instruction:
In this task, you must classify if a given review is positive/negative, indicating your answer as P or N.
question:
ever watch a very young child try and tell a joke that is beyond his , or her , sophistication ?
it 's full of stops and starts and usually , the punch line is ruined .
i felt the same way watching drowning mona .
skip a stone across water and you approximate the depth of this attempt at an ensemble comedy .
there are some slightly successful attempts at humor , but they only serve as window dressing .
there is a running gag about the town , verplanck , n .
y .
, being a test town for the then new yugo .
everyone drives a yugo , differentiating their cars with personalized license plates .
even the police chief drives one .
there is a certain sublimeness to the image of a lights and siren decked out yugo skittering its way through the town streets .
there also is a running gag about one of the characters , jeff , missing a hand and how it occurred .
it pokes gentle fun at the notion of urban legends .
it turns out the truth is more horrifying than any legend .
there are some sight gags that pop up as well , such as mona 's tombstone , which reads " demoted " , instead of devoted .
still , the core of the story maintains the flatness of a still pond .
the lynchpin of the film falls on the redundant and sporadic scenes involving mona ( midler ) .
each scene with her is the same : scream at someone , hit someone , then scream some more .
there 's no uniqueness or modulation to her or explanation for her meanness .
anyone off the street could have played the role , such as it is .
the other characters are walking cardboard cutouts .
each one is defined by one trait and no further attempt is made at deeper characterization .
there is a burly , female car mechanic , so of course , there is a forced lesbianism gag .
mona 's son , jeff ( marcus thomas ) is a simpleton , hence
you can predict his dialogue before it even plods its way from his mouth .
chief of police rash ( devito ) likes broadway musicals and loves his daughter .
there 's nothing more to him .
elle , the chief 's daughter ( campbell ) , is bland personified , a dutiful girl with no higher aspiration than to have a child and be married .
mona 's husband phil ( fichtner ) jeckle and hydes from shirking coward to reptilian letch .
bob ( affleck ) , elle 's betrothed , and business partner to jeff , is a mumbling , obvious dullard .
there is no contrast to any of the characters .
by having at least one character with some wit , or wits , to serve as counterpoint to the others , perhaps steinfeld 's attempt at satirizing a small town infested with ambitionless people might have come off better .
ostensibly a murder mystery , drowning mona gives you almost all the clues immediately , then lets you sit back and feel superior as you watch the cast of paper people fumble their way to finding the killer , who could be anyone due to mona 's loving manner with everyone on town .
even that aspect of the film fails , throwing in a convenient , ridiculous and unsatisfying wrap to things .
it 's been a while since i walked away from a movie theater in an angry mood .
what makes it all the more remarkable is that i rarely remember a comedy making me so angry for wasting my time at it 's ineptitude .
answer:
N


question:
this film is extraordinarily horrendous and i 'm not going to waste any more words on it .
answer:
N


question:
reindeer games is easily the worst of the three recent films penned by ehren kruger ( scream 3 and arlington
rd are the others , each derivative in their own special way ) .
the guy ca n't seem to write believable dialogue
( sample from reindeer games : " rule # 1 : never put a car thief behind the wheel " ) , create multi - faceted characters , or even engineer coherent plots
but he sure knows how to pile on numerous nonsensical twists and turns ( no matter if each one deems the actual story increasingly unlikely ) .
his screenplay for reindeer games turns the tables on the audience so many times that watching the film becomes something of a punishment with no reward anywhere in sight .
i can just envision kruger laughing behind his keyboard ,
" oh you thought my movie was gon na go here ,
f
* ck you jack ass , take that twist ,
decipher this mother f * cker !
"
it 's almost as if the writer were angry at us for shelling out money to see his stupid movie .
and why the hell would anyone want to invest time in a movie when the screenwriter keeps changing his own rules for no reason other than to congratulate himself on how damn clever he is ?
auteur theory be damned ; it 's kruger 's " style " , not the director 's that winds up on screen .
kruger has obviously never paid much mind to the old chestnut " sometimes less is more " .
and his numerous twists ca n't even claim to be originals ; arlington rd 's ending is a direct steal from the much better alan
j .
pakula thriller the parallax view , and in reindeer games we get this ol' gem ; character incriminates themself by saying something they should n't know ( pronouns used to protect the gender of the " character " .
. .
grammar be damned ) .
"
how did you know that ?
" the stunned protagonist asks , suddenly realizing that the character was in on the whole thing all along . . . since twist endings are currently so in vogue , and seeing as how kruger 's screenplays usually come equipped with about three twists per ending , i guess it 's no wonder why he works so frequently .
he 's quickly becoming miramax 's mickey mouse ; the company has already signed him to work on several of their upcoming projects .
this is appropriate considering that miramax ( which used to place their label on some of the most artistically daring films ) has quickly become a grindhouse for coddling foreign imports ( life is beautiful ) and freddie prinze jr .
vehicles .
their company 's current logo could be
"
we ride the trends " . reindeer games stars ben affleck as rudy , a supposedly hardened criminal spending his days and nights behind bars with fantasies of pecan pies dancing atop his head .
although affleck is given some barbed wire tattoos to insinuate bad assness , he plays the role like steve guttenberg preciously mugging through a police academy flick .
affleck is such a puppy dog that it 's impossible to believe he could survive in a harsh prison environment without becoming nearly everyone 's bitch .
the role itself is so badly written ( the character only grows balls when the plot calls for it ) , the twists so outrageous , and the directing so self consciously gritty that this is about as close to self parody as i can recall a recent " serious " movie getting .
it may have been wiser had the film makers simply went all the way in that direction , casting jerry seinfeld as the hardened criminal and howard stern as the sniveling bad guy ( who 's played here by gary sinise in yet another over the top villain performance ) james frain is nick , rudy 's cellmate , a manslaughterer who 's found a pen pal in the gorgeous ashley mason ( charlize theron ) .
ashley is a prison groupie who sends nick many cheesecake photos of her though she 's never seen one picture of him .
which works out fine since the character is killed in a near - riot , and rudy ( who was to be paroled on the same day as nick ) takes his place , which leads to a sudden and very frenzied sex scene between ashley and rudy ( so frenzied it kinda looks like rape ) and a surprise visit from ashley 's brother , gabriel ( gary sinise ) , who waltzes into their shabby hotel room flanked by his thuggish co - horts .
he plans to rob an indian casino on christmas eve with the assistance of rudy who he thinks is nick who , according to what he wrote in the letters to ashley , used to work as a guard in the indian casino .
though by the end , the film pulls the rug out from under us so frequently that everything i 've described might as well be irrelevant .
this is what you can expect should you chose to take this reindeer on ; several scenes in which , after catching his prey , the bad guy proceeds to stall interminably until the good guy has a chance to kill his captor and crack
a stupid one - liner .
included : two ( 2 ) scenes of two ( 2 ) different bad guys explaining their motives to the hero when they should be killing him ( one following the other no less ) .
though it 's an action film , the ending is more a talkfest where we get the whole movie explained to us by one flustered character actor after another while affleck looks on , incredulous as the audience .
the flick was directed by john frankenheimer , a straightforward action director who lucked into the manchurian candidate early in his career , fell off the a - list following a string of flops and now , in his old age , is slowly climbing his way back up .
it would be a success story if he were choosing better scripts but his last major film was ronin
( one of those almost but not quite movies ) which followed the island of dr .
morneau ( you remember , the one with marlon brando in mime make - up and a not so flattering moo - moo ) , and now this .
he films action sequences with a minimum of quick cutting which i like considering that nowadays action scenes are commonly comprised of millisecond flash cuts strung together and laid out for a brain - zapped mtv audience to pick apart .
problem is these action scenes ( nearly all failed escapes )
serve no purpose in the story other than to further pad out the running time and to remind the audience that their watching an action movie rather than a filmed radio play .
character problems abound ; rudy is made to shift between sweet boy next door earnestness and hard edged wiseacre , the latter of which is not ( at least at this point ) something ben affleck is capable of pulling off .
the former he can do with ease and often the actor coasts on his lackadaisical charm while those around him growl and swear .
but then suddenly affleck starts growling and swearing alongside them like the class clown imitating a tarantino gangster .
charlize theron , an extraordinary talent , is , like affleck , playing whatever part the script requires her to play , whether it be vulnerability at one moment , anger at the next .
she never has a chance to evince any charm or make much of an impression beyond her obvious physical attributes ( frankenheimer has her needlessly pop her top to further italicize this .
gary sinise has played this role frequently , and here , as in snake eyes , he does the snarling bad guy thing with such over the top vitriol
( the guy must be so incredibly bored of stomping through the same paces that going out of control is the only thing that keeps him interested any more ) , that it becomes more of an annoyance
( oh there he goes again ? ? ? ) than a threat .
these are talented people who made the mistake of jumping on to a script with little but stock characters and a bag of tricks that it dully springs on its audience .
answer:

N