My Review

I was looking forward to seeing this film since I first heard about it. The pictures and videos from the website looked fantastic. Unfortunately it wasn't playing in a theater anywhere near me, but reading roget ebert's raving review made me more excited. SO, finally, it comes out on dvd. I go to order it from netflix and I notice that it has the lowest average rating for any movie I've ever seen on there. Also, the reviews on the main dvd page are all negative. Im confused on how mainstream critics could love the film so much, yet average people seemed to find it to be terrible. A few days later, it arrives in the mail..

*SOME SPOILERS AHEAD*

Ok, first of all, this is an extremely poorly made film. I could tell that after watching 5 minutes of it. First of all, the acting is poor, even from individuals who have proven they could act in other features. I blame that on poor directing. A good director can find ways to pull the proper emotional states out of people. Also, the film is confusing, a few of the characters are played by the same actors, but not others, so it can be disorienting at times trying to keep everyone straight the way the filmmaker intended us to. Furthermore, the actors personalities are so extreme it's hard to take the film seriously. The good guys are like Gandhi, the bad guys are like Hitler. This is supposed to be based on real events so it would be nice if the characters had some realistic actions to them. The native american woman is probably the worst thing about this movie. She's just a ripoff of all those other yoda-like wise characters in films, but a lot more boring. She just wanders in to the scene and "knows" everything. Also... is Karen black stronger than mike patton when she strangles him with the chains? The scene where karen black gets sold out at the carnival when she's in hiding was poorly done. Also, the scene where she's getting beaten to death, it looks like she's laughing and not taking this seriously. The ending made me wonder, what was the point? And I didnt need to see a naked midget, some scenes like that were just uncomfortable and made me wonder why I was watching this thing. It would have been nice if there was some good music to the film, too, you had mike patton to work with, any one of this albums added to this film would have helped.

There were some good things about the movie. The visual of the carnival was nice. The scene in the carpet store was well done. But, I think the reason why ebert gave a good review is because he like what the movie COULD have been. It had an interesting idea, and maybe he hopes it inspires others to make interesting films. Im sure he has to see the same hollywood crap over and over again so anything different is a good day for him.