TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you must classify if a given review is positive/negative, indicating your answer as P or N.
PROBLEM: bob the happy bastard 's quickie review : the odd couple ii grumpy old men , it ai n't .
hell , my fellow americans
, it ai n't .
walter matthau and jack lemmon team up again for an even more worn out vehicle
than any of their films over the past few years .
odd couple ii feels terribly generic , where in the first movie , made thirty one years ago , feels like a wonderful tale .
that 's like repackaging campbell 's soup in a generic food can , really .
how writer neil simon could 've made such a horrible mistake
in screen writing is beyond me .
throughout the movie , i really did n't laugh once . honestly .
i mean , there were dumb situations , yeah , like the cropduster who let these old geezers have it without any notice , but they just really did n't seem funny to me .
and that car rolling off the cliff ?
the only way i would 've seen humor in that is if they were still in it .
and the ending gets all super - mushy , too .
in the final twenty minutes or so , lemmon meets a girl he thinks is the one , then loses her ; matthau talks to his son ( a wasted jonathan silverman ) about his amrriage to lemmon 's daughter ; and , of course , lemmon and matthau have another roomie situation on their hands .
ooh , i really gave a lot away there , i 'm sure .
consider it a hospitable gester ,
you wo n't waste your time renting this muck .

SOLUTION: N

PROBLEM: i do n't appreciate it when a thriller manipulates the viewer into thinking the plot is interesting , when in fact it 's ludicrous .
in the case of the general 's daughter , the plot is more than capable of intriguing you to a certain point .
but at this juncture in the story , the movie begins to fall apart like a crumbling cookie .
this predictable summer thriller is only sporadically involving , and that is unfortunately not enough to compensate for all of it 's detailed flaws .
get past one moment early on where john travolta exercises his southern accent , and you 're likely to survive this entire movie .
travolta plays criminal investigations divisions officer paul brenner , who 's working undercover at a military base when another situation arises : the apparent rape and murder of a young female officer ( leslie stefanson ) .
it turns out that the victim is the daughter of general joe campbell ( james cromwell ) .
let the investigation begin .
with the assistance of fellow cid investigator sarah sunhill ( played rather on - the - sidelines by madeleine stowe ) , brenner uncovers what appears to be an intricate and bizarre homicide case .
things begin to get marginally engrossing when we meet colonel moore ( james woods ) , a former commanding officer of the deceased who has a few secrets up his sleeve .
woods submits another scene - stealing performance here as he oozes authority , surrounded by clouds of smoke emitted from his cigar .
with echoes of his supporting role in true crime , in which he duked it out with clint eastwood in enjoyably profane verbal exchanges , he makes every moment believable .
here though , the intense dialogue comes care of confrontations with travolta , as the two send mindful , knowing glares across the room .
there are many scenes such as this in the general 's daughter , in which the veteran cast performs splendidly under pressure , but the circumstances that tie these meetings together are difficult to absorb .
director simon west ( con air ) , shows a watchful eye of delivering a stylish looking thriller , but he fails miserably when it comes to the intellectual part of it .
the general 's daughter is , more often than not ,
a predictable and unexciting mess .
it does not help matters that the plot is virtually actionless , dragging it 's heels all the way at a mind - numbing snails pace .
a few brief action scenes , marvelously handled in the editing department , show that the movie could have delivered such a more proficient package .
from a director who does such a great job of staging explosions and miraculous stunts , i suggest west should stick with mindless , rip - roaring action features and attempt to avoid future projects like this .
still , the movie is certainly not without it 's merits .
the acting is very good from the majority of the experienced cast .
the performances range from commanding ( travolta ) to electric ( woods ) to stiff - as - a - board
( cromwell , who does n't show off his real talents here ) .
madeleine stowe manages to hold her own for a while , but as the female lead in an action - thriller , she does n't pull through sufficiently .
one of the problems with the execution is that it 's very predictable .
>
from minute one , i had few doubts about the identity of the killer in question .
the script even unwillingly points him out for us , using familiar techniques to hide his guilt until the unmasking toward the end .
in all fairness , we 've seen many of the devices used in the general 's daughter put to greater effect in other films .
the secrets behind the girl 's mysterious death are explained gradually , but by the resolution we have tunneled through so much malarkey that it feels unnecessary and surprisingly silly .
the general 's daughter is not a terrible movie , and it is involving enough to sustain a viewer 's attention span for a certain period of time .
but it just could have been so much better .

SOLUTION: N

PROBLEM: when the haunting arrived in theaters , all i kept hearing about was the overdone special effects and the fact that very often the unseen bumps in the night in a horror film are far scarier than those that you can put a face to courtesy of special effects .
while i agree that this remake of the haunting goes a bit overboard in the visual effects department , i do n't think that they are completely to blame for this movie 's failure .
it appears that some people have failed to take into account that the original haunting had the " unseen " terrors , and it was about as scary as a dust bunny .
so special effects or not , if the story is n't the least bit scary , you are n't going to end up with a very frightening movie .
the thing that interested me most about this movie was the caretaker of this building played by bruce dern .
dern is always great , and even though he may have had only about 3 minutes of screen time he was still the most interesting element of the movie .
as i sat through the seemingly endless , albeit fairly impressive , special effects , i kept wishing that this movie was about dern 's caretaker and not the one dimensional characters that populated the cast .
never a good sign when a bit player is the best part of the movie .
liam neeson plays a scientist who is conducting experiments on fear .
he decides the best way to get results is to trick a group of fairly unstable individuals to spend a few days in a haunted mansion .
he tricks them into participating by letting on that he is conducting an experiment on insomnia .
and he also fails to mention that the mansion has a reputation for strange goings - on .
catherine zeta - jones ,
lili taylor and owen wilson play his subjects .
like the original , taylor 's character is the star of the movie .
but since she does n't quite have the marquee power of liam neeson and ms .
zeta - jones , their parts did seem to be a big larger than in the original .
and let 's face it , probably half the people who see this movie will do so because of zeta - jones .
i 'll admit that i would have never seen this thing if she were n't in it .
but the real stars here is the special effects combined with the fairly overdone sets .
they take over the movie as the supernatural elements of the house start to interact with our hapless insomnia patients .
there really is n't much of a story here .
just endless setups
so director jan de bont can showcase all the nifty special effects that he got to play with .
and the special effects are great .
in many cases they are as good as you are likely to see anywhere .
in other cases they are overdone and obviously thrown in just for the sake of hitting the " cool shots " quota
.
at no point in the movie do any of these things ever come close to being scary -- funny , maybe .
but not scary .
then we have the set .
when i first saw the house , i was very impressed with the very cool gothic look about it .
but it only took a short tour by the characters around the place to see that the set designers obviously had as much money to burn as the visual effects people did , and decided to take the idiotically overdone route .
this included a flooded hallway with books as stepping stones and a mirrored circular room that revolves .
what part did these rooms play in the story ?
absolutely none .
they were just there to take our minds off the fact that there was neither a descent story nor a single scare in the entire movie .
then we have the actors .
lili taylor has never been one of my favorites .
and when the fact that her character is mousy and pathetic is factored in , she comes in around the average or slightly below mark .
i have no idea why liam neeson took this role .
he basically reminded me of the ringmaster at an out of control circus .
his character was in charge of this farce but it quickly got away from him .
i have no doubt that liam will want to lock all prints of this movie in a very secure vault along with all copies of darkman .
zeta - jones was cast because she is too hot for words .
the fact that her character is bi - sexual is just icing on the cake .
all catherine has to do in this movie is look good .
fortunately that is something she does very well .
while she does have a fairly good size part , it is obvious that her only purpose in the movie was as eye - candy .
it 's too bad someone of her talents wasted them here .
any random supermodel pulled out of a fashion show could have easily filled her role .
the haunting is the antithesis of another of 1999 's horror movies , the blair witch project .
the haunting had a seemingly limitless effects budget , while blair witch relies on piles of rocks for its scares .
both prove quite nicely that special effects are irrelevant to a horror film .
if the story sucks , it 's all downhill from there .
my advice ? if you are looking for special effects , go rent star wars .
if it 's scares you want , rent halloween .
either way , it 's probably in your best interests to skip the haunting .

SOLUTION:
N