input: The movie held my interest, mainly because Dianne Keaton is my favorite actress. I disagree with some of the other posts on the grounds that the plot was not convoluted. I had no trouble following it (maybe some people had too much eggnog the night before). The movie was very sad and touching as well. What more do you want? Alexa Davalos is a fine new talent (beautiful too), and Tom Everett Scott does an excellent job with his part as well. The relationship of the mother and daughter may have been a bit unrealistic, but the behavior of the young people in the movie was not. It was tragically sad but enlightening. It sure beat the other shows that were on TV New Years Day evening

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: The first 30 minutes of Tinseltown had my finger teetering on the remote, poised to flick around to watch something else. The premise of two writers, down on their luck, living in a self-storage-space "bin" was mildly amusing, but, painfully bland.

The introduction of the character, played by Joe Pantoliano - the big deal movie guy, that lives in the park and sleeps in a lavatory, offered hope and I decided to give it a few more minutes. And then a few more until Kristy Swansons introduction as a budding film director & borderline nymphomaniac, added a bit of spice. Her solid acting performance raised her presence above and beyond just a very welcome eye-candy inclusion.

Ultimately, the obvious low-budget impacts on the film with poorly shot scenes, stuttured pace and slapstick handling of certain moments. Some of my favourite movies of all time have been low budget, Whithnail & I being one that also deals with 2 guys with a dream, but down on their luck.

However, for my money, the actors save Tinseltown from the "Terrible movie" archives and just about nudges it into the "could have been a cult movie" archives. I laughed out loud at some of the scenes involving Joe Pantoliano's character. In particular, the penultimate scenes in the terribly cliched, but still funny, rich-but-screwed-up characters house, where the story unravels towards it's final moments.

I can see how Tinseltown was a great stage play and while the film-makers did their best to translate this to celluloid, it simply didn't work and while I laughed out loud at some of scenes and one liners, I think the first 30 minutes dulled my senses and expectations to such a degree I would have laughed at anything.

Unless you're stuck for a novelty coffee coaster, don't pick this up if you see it in a bargain bucket.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: This film started out very promising with the story about a director who loses his sight and a blind woman who is bound to help him. However, somewhere in the middle it seemed like the script writers didn't know where to go from there.

One unbelievable event followed the next (Russia must be very small because they are all bumping into each other all the time), the motivation of the female lead character comprehensible (why does she still follow him after they got off the ship? Why doesn't she try to borrow a mobile phone on the ship to call somebody?), the side stories were completely ridiculous (was the story with the mother and the boyfriend supposed to be funny? And what was the story with the younger sister about?). Still with all this seeming arbitrariness of the plot, the movie managed to be completely predictable.

The saddest thing about it is that there was a lot of potential. As I said, the idea of the film was good, the visuals and the score were very beautiful and the actors of the main characters were good, too. So this could have been a really good film... but it wasn't.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: An overblown melodrama typical of its period (mid-1950s) and appropriate matinee food. Rock Hudson, the hulk everyone always falls in love with, plays his usual stereotype role, but whereas in Giant, made the same year, when his material and co-stars (Taylor & Dean) were above average, in this movie he is just not good enough to raise the calibre beyond a mushy tale of how difficult it is to be both rich and happy. The self-destructive brother and sister (Robert Stack, reeling his way through the film in a drunken stupor, and Dorothy Malone, playing a vampish poor little rich girl totally over the top) end up the losers and Hudson gets Bacall - who is rather wooden in this part which does not have enough character or wit to get her going. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the good end happily and the bad unhappily, that is the meaning of fiction. However, I was interested to read that the film is based on a true story which vindicated the plot. Like other films of the period, homosexuality is disguised in heterosexual terms. Maybe the film could be remade: Stack's character would ring truer if he was hiding homosexual feelings for Mitch by marrying. Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven greatly improved on All That Heaven Allows , also directed by Sirk. Perhaps Haynes could remake Written on the Wind and give us a truly memorable film.

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pos/neg ans:
positive