Problem: positive
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Answer: Fabulous film! Rented the DVD recently and was floored by this stunning piece of work. Douglas Sirk was a filmmaking genius and he gets performances out of Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone (Oscar winner), Robert Stack (Oscar nominated), and Lauren Bacall that words cannot describe. Paul Verhoeven brilliantly payed homage to this film by having Dorothy Malone play Sharon Stone's murdering inspirational guru in his Basic Instinct. What a great joke!

By turns the film is hilarious, riveting, campy, biting, trashy, compelling, and eye rolling! It's definately the grandaddy of every tawdry big-and-little screen soap opera but none have had the dazzling style like you'll see here: the camera work is smooth and polished, the use of color is breathtaking, the opening montage set to the title song is beyond memorable, the one dimensional characters are unforgettable, and the final image will have you scratching your head as to how the censors back then let it make the final cut!

While most older, highly regarded films can sometimes be a boring chore to sit through, Written on the Wind contains so much and goes by so fast that it's actually a shame when it ends. Thank you to Mr. Sirk for crafting -and Todd Haynes for drawing attention to- what has now become one of my favorite films of all time! SEE THIS MOVIE!!!

Problem: positive
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Answer: This is my third comment here attempting to connect two legendary movie comedy teams: Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello. The connection here is the year 1940. That's the date that the former had their last movie from their longtime home studio of Hal Roach. I'll mention the significance of the latter later on. Besides being the last time Stan and Ollie worked at the Lot of Fun, it's also the final time they would appear with such familiar supporting players like Charlie Hall and James Finlayson who appeared in most of their films. It's also the last time Art Lloyd would serve as their cameraman and Marvin Hatley-who composed their theme song which would be known as "The Cuckoo Song (Dance of the Cuckoos)"-their score. And it would be the very last time Stan Laurel would be allowed to exercise complete creative control over what goes on film. If there is a more gag-laden structure than usual in this L & H film, it's nice to know most of those gags are indeed funny. That includes most of the sound and visual effects, the latter provided by longtime Roach staffer Roy Seawright. In this one, Ollie has "hornophobia" from working at a noisy horn factory so Dr. Finlayson prescribes going out to sea for his rest. Ollie doesn't like to go boating so Stan suggests they just rent one that's docked so they wouldn't have to go anywhere. After they find one they like, we find out that convict Nick Grainger (Richard Cramer) has just escaped...I'll stop there and say this was as good a finale for L & H's longtime home as one could hope for. It's hilarious mostly from beginning to end and knowing this would be their last for the man partly responsible for their teaming is indeed poignant when one thinks of it. Oh, and I have a couple more lasts to mention: it's the final film appearance of both Harry Bernard, who plays a harbor patrolman after years of encountering Stan and Ollie as a policeman, and that of Ben Turpin, the cross-eyed comic who was born in New Orleans which is a couple of hours away from my current hometown of Baton Rouge, whose second L & H appearance this was having previously "married" the boys in Our Wife. The latter performer especially has a genuine comic moment. All right, I mentioned 1940 being the year Stan and Ollie had their last movie released from Hal Roach Studios. It was also the first year that a comedy team, both born in the state of New Jersey, would make their first picture at what would be their home studio, Universal. The director of that movie would be the same one that guided L & H in The Flying Deuces the previous year. His name was A. Edward Sutherland. P.S. It was during this filming that script supervisor Virginia Lucille Jones had an accident involving a rolled-up carpet. That incident caused Oliver "Babe" Hardy to send her roses to her hospital room. They fell in love and married on March 7, 1940. It lasted until Babe's death in 1957.

Problem: negative
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Answer:
Simply not the quality I expected from Morris (love Brass Eye and Blue Jam). This is very much like a not so bad student film. What concerns me, in all this is WHY DID IT WIN A BAFTA??? Morris makes fun of 'enshrined mediocrity' (Ayn Rand) in much of his work (Nathan Barley) and yet with this piece is urinating down the backs of the talented and telling us its raining!

I just hope as he has chosen a subject I would love to tackle (the humanity of terrorism - Four Lions) that he isn't going to cock that up, wasting the opportunity to make a statement about the farce of mainstream ignorance and opinion on this emotive and heavily spun phenomena.