An example of a movie review. negative.

A: Stephen J. Cannell apparently decided a few years ago that he would broaden his horizons and dabble in horror. The result, "Dead Above Ground", is an abysmal piece of junk. Now, had I noticed his name in association with THIS particular film I'd have put it back but no, I didn't have my glasses on and therefore I missed it, damn, I really do need to bring those with me while video shopping. First question would be, who the heck is the target audience for this? It's almost like a "scary" kids movie, but then again there's topless babes and some gore and some bad words spouted here and there. The main characters are so cute that you want to see someone, anyone, go after them with farm implements of SOME kind. Seems that a guy opens a bed and breakfast that has a checkered past, a child-murdering witch that collected children's teeth lived there. Probably something the real estate agent failed to mention. Of course now in the modern day there's a little girls ghost around to warn the real-live little girl that now lives there that something bad is going to happen. It does, and there's also two Bubbas that were squatting on that property when the new owner took over so they're out for revenge too. This whole thing has the feel of some made-for-cable junk that's for the kids at Halloween except for, of course, the things that aren't suitable for little kids, so not only is this mediocre, it's confused, too. A big boo and hiss to Anchor Bay for putting this out too, considering their usual track record with fine releases this is a new low. The UK gets a Phantasm Box Set, we get "The Tooth Fairy". Hardly seems fair. 1 out of 10, absolute garbage.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A: Too many secondary plot lines without a primary one. Too many hot buttons are pushed without any reason, they managed to stuff this boring film, that does not say anything, with every drama element that is out there: death, divorce, money issues, parenting problems, suicide, psychological problems, drug abuse, adoption, rejected love, traveling problems, sex, generations misunderstandings, robbery, legal issues, guns, medical ethics, "deep real love" You would think that it would make for an interesting movie, but hell no all these events are secondary to something primary which is not there. Boring. Not to mention that the "super-deep" (and super-long) lecture to the child at the end of the film is a total nonsense. Pity.

Oh, forgot to mention: the actors, all of them, are quite good. That's what kept me from turning it off. To bad their talents went to waste, The film is well shot, too: the light, the motion etc. of every episode -- that's all in place. It's just the meaning that's missing.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A:
The point of Wolfe's original novel -- indeed the point of the whole story -- is that things take place because of a carefully calculated sense of expediency. The goal is survival within a particular kind of life style. The novel is full of malice. The only relationship that rings emotionally true is that between Sherman and his daughter, Campbell, and that's only touched upon. That aside, everyone is out for what he can get in the way of publicity, power, money or self aggrandizement.

Wolfe was criticized for hitting every character and every social segment of New York City over the head. His response was a denial. After all, he lived in New York himself and belonged to a neighborhood improvement committee and other admirable organizations, exactly the qualifications one would want on his resume in order to deny that he disliked New Yorkers. (Wolfe has a PhD in American Studies from Yale and is no dummy.) Those supposed weaknesses are what made the novel memorable. Nobody was any good. And Sherman McCoy wound up broke, a professional protester for social justice. The movie throws all of that away and imposes a moral frame on the story that simply doesn't fit. Wolfe did his homework. The novel was rooted in reality. Every event was not only possible but thoroughly believable. Wolfe might have made a great cultural anthropologist -- he knows how to get inside a system and record its details.

Yes, any of us might have found ourselves, as Sherman and his mistress do, stuck in the South Bronx, threatened by a couple of black kids, and making a getaway after bumping into one of them. That scene is transferred neatly from print to celluloid.

But after that scene the movie seems not to trust its audience and at times become frantic in its attempt to spell out its message, however nebulous the message is.

Sherman might accidentally hit some kid and be arrested for it as he is in the novel, but he would not immediately upon his release from jail go back to his phenomenally expensive condo, take out a shotgun, and start shooting into the ceiling with it, as he does in the movee. In what's supposed to be a funny scene, ceiling plaster falls all over the party guests and they scurry away, shrieking. It simply would not have happened. The movie has left the novel's unspeakably detailed reality in the dust. Wolfe's sensibility, the work he put into capturing the real, has been lost. What we get instead is a noisy, fantastic, and silly scene that doesn't do anything except wake the audience up. Similar empty scenes follow, screaming out for Wolfe's verisimilitude.

The movie also fails because it thrusts a lot of sin and redemption into an entertaining story of moral nihilism. Here we see "Don Juan in Hell" at the opera. We get lectures on redemption from a poet with AIDs. We see a lot of guilt in Sherman. A black judge who preaches from the bench and gives one of those final speeches about how we all have to start behaving nicely again. A reporter who feels sorry for Sherman after turning him into a sacrificial lamb. And a happy ending in which Sherman gets off by breaking the law with an idiotic grin. The scene sits on the movie like a jester's cap on a circus elephant's head.

The movie not only makes points that are already trite and unoriginal, it overstates them, as if the audience were incapable of absorbing any subtleties.

It's not the acting or the direction that's poor. The film's not bad in those respects. And the photography is pretty good too, including two rather spectacular shots -- the gargoyles of the Chrysler building and the landing of the Concorde. It's the script that is thoroughly botched.

The first half of the movie, roughly, is okay in conception and execution. It keeps some of the little details from the novel. Sherman and Judy's dog is named Marshall. Who the hell would name a dog Marshall? It loses its focus almost completely in the second half and on the whole is barely worth watching.

Wolfe's cynical redneck right-wingism may be offensive to a lot of people, but he's got the cojones to lay his percepts out. Alas the writers and producers did not have the courage to pick them up and thus blew the chance to make a fascinating study of New Yorkers.