Director: Alan
Rudolph | Starring:
Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte,
Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly, Lukas Haas, Omar Epps
Released: 1999
| Runtime: 110m
| Rating (out of 5):
*½ |
|
Repeat after me: I will
never, I repeat never, try to make another movie out of a Kurt Vonnegut
book as long as we all shall live. That should be the oath that all
directors swear to when they are inducted into the Director's Guild.
It would have saved us from this horrendous mess of a movie, and saved
poor Kurt the unfortunate massacre of yet another brilliant novel.
Where to begin? Actually, that's one question Alan Rudolph may have
wanted to ask himself before he started adapting the script. If I
didn't know any better (and who says I do?) I could swear 90% of this
movie was adlibbed. The original book was supposed to be a commentary
on the Vietnam War and the effect war had on America's psyche, its
alienating principals and detachment from reality, etc. But that's
not the core issue. The biggest problem with this film is that none
of the actors seemed to know what their "motivation" was. Why is Dwayne
Hoover (Bruce Willis) slowly going insane? Why does Harry LaSabre
(Nick Nolte) like to wear women's clothes? Why does Wayne Hoobler
(Omar Epps) want so badly to work for Wayne Hoover? And why the hell
did Rudolph bring Hoover's wife (Barbara Hershey) back from the dead?
In the book she drinks Drano before the book even starts and Dwayne
lives with his dog with no tail and a maid. In the movie she's a depressive
who watches commercials all day and pops pills called "Goodbye Blue
Monday". The line is a famous one from the book, but has absolutely
nothing to do with his wife, nor medication. I can only assume Rudolph
brought his wife back from the dead just as a device to get this line
in the movie somehow. Weak, very weak. There are so many subtleties
to the book that are completely lost on the movie. In the book, Vonnegut
himself appears right before all hell breaks loose as the master of
the universe, controlling the actions of his characters to some extent,
like a puppet master. This is totally left out of the movie (obviously)
and takes away a large message about fate and the extent to which
we are all directed by forces above and beyond our control. What comes
out is a sloppy mix of corny overacting, directionless weirdness and
a screenplay gone horribly awry. This may definitely go down in the
annals of movie history as one of the worst films ever made, but gets
one-and-a-half stars from me for the studio's sheer balls to actually
show this dog to the viewing public (barely). [free screening]
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