IN: Review: The Rookie kept me smiling from beginning to end. Dennis Quaid played the role to perfection. The little boy that plays his son was fantastic. He made this a father-son movie to remember. The messages are good ones. Follow your dreams. Failing at the pursuit is alright as long as you try. The excitement is palpable. I believe this movie will be a classic.
What is this review like?
OUT: positive

IN: Review: ... but the trouble of this production is that it's very far from a good musical.

Granted, one can't always expect the witty masters like Sondheim or Bernstein or Porter; yet the music of this piece makes even Andrew Lloyd Webber look witty. It's deadly dull and uninventive (with one or two exceptions) and just after I watched it I couldn't recall a single significant melody - which is rather tragic coming from someone who learned the whole Another Hundred People from three listenings.

It is also strangely un-theatrical. It takes place on an incredibly large stage (one really has to feel sorry for those people in front rows who broke their necks in order to see something happening 50 meters on the right or 100 meters on the left) and does absolutely nothing with it. When there's supposed to be one person singing on-stage, that's just what you get - and the rest of the enormeous stage is empty. For me as an aspiring theatre director it was almost painful to watch.

The fact remains, Cole Porter seems to have captured the French culture in his works better than these no-talents can ever come close to. And I'm puzzled by the popularity of this would-be-legendary musical.
What is this review like?
OUT: negative

IN: Review: It was by accident that I was scanning the TV channels and found this wonderful film about two beautiful human beings who become attracted to each other in a very innocent and virgin like approach to each other. Ethan Hawke (Jesse) "Tape" '01 and Julie Delpy (Celine) "ER" 94 TV Series (Nicole). This gal and guy, will warm your very heart and soul and make you think deeply into your past relationships and how you really wish you had followed your hearts strings with a guy or gal you deep down loved and lost track of over the years. Jesse and Celine have great conversation, and deep eye contact with a great magnetic explosion between the two of them. I am looking forward to the SEQUEL to this film in 2004 and if you have viewed this film, you will feel the same way.
What is this review like?
OUT: positive

IN: Review: ***SPOILERS*** With a gathering of family members and servants of the late Christopher Dean, John Carradine, to hear his last will and testament they get somewhat of a surprise in that the Dean fortune, some 140 million dollars. The money is to be divided between them but only after they successfully spend a week at the Dean mansion. There seemed to have been a mix-up in the story when we later find out that it's really an overnight sleepover, not a weeks vacation, at the mansion for the guests to qualify for Dean's money since almost everyone ends up dead by sunrise.

The first victim of the Dean Curse have nothing at all to do with getting and money from the departed Christopher Dean estate the local sheriff Dan Garcia, Rodolfo Acosta. Acosta has his head chopped off refrigerated and then served on a platter to a shocked group of guests. Later that evening cute little Chin Greg and Laura's,Jeff Morrow & Marry Anders,little pet pooch is found dead outside floating in the pond.

The movie has all the people staying at the Dean Mansion being picked off one by one until it's revealed who the killer really is. We then have what seems to be a double-twist in the story where the original killer is suddenly killed together with two of the last remaining guest. The real killer ends up not only getting all the loot, 140 million dollars, but then ends up not having to split it with his accomplice by doing him, or her, in by giving him a poisonous cookie that kills him on the spot.

Nonsensical who done it, and haunted house, movie with a cast of such immoral and unlikable characters that even a mother, much less the audience, would have trouble liking. There's everything you can possibly think of in the move involving the selective guests that includes incest S&M sadism and of course double-dealing and back-stabbing not even counting murder. You just couldn't care less who of the guests survives to collect the Dean fortune at the end of the movie hoping against all hope then none of them do.

Even the big surprise at the end isn't really that much of a surprise since the killer's identity is divulged with the film-maker having forgotten to keep his face in the shadows so you actual see who he is even before he reveals himself! We then have a plot-twist that eliminates the killer together with a number of remaining guest just to make the movie a little more confusing then it already is. The final plot-twist, that you can see coming from as far as ten miles away, was just to show how smart the very obvious killer was which fooled almost nobody watching the movie.
What is this review like?
OUT:
negative