Queensboro Bridge Oct 23, '07     5:45 PM ( B. Lemkowitz)

THE DYING GAUL  ...Craig Lucas  director and screenwriter. Too bad a good actor like Campbell Scott had to appear in this pretentious fabrication ' your script is so beautiful don't become one of them'    WOW where have we heard this kind of writing before ??  Peter Sarsgaard  another show off phony but not as good as Charlize Theron or  Philip Hoffman is all over the place in this one. A film that should have gone right to DVD and avoided the theatres.  The  WORST film of the year.

Our picks for the month.....  

ON THE WATERFRONT

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

AND 

MEMBER OF THE WEDDING

JARHEAD  ... somehow this film reminds me of that fat little bastard  Dick Cheney growing  fatter and richer on the missing arms and legs depicted in this crummy film. Now don't get me wrong the acting is good but the script has no point of view . The film is an empty headed reflection of our present culture slick and glossy with no center. These mechanized kids are all super patriots and too young to reflect on those draft-dodging bastards in Washington dressing and preening for formal dinners and conferences while the chief ass stands in front of placards proclaiming ' Stay the Course'  or  ' Strategy for Victory'    look here you little monster you should be ashamed of yourself !!!!!!

 KING KONG   A fabulous new age version of an old classic where the effects make sense in every way. Beautifully designed and intentionally hokey. The film is set in the early 30's. The effect is cartoonish but in the same way Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy was a decade ago. Forget all the posturing about the white blond caught amidst savage hordes in darkest Africa it is simply part of the histrionics of correctness. This show is P.T. Barnumish and it's a winner. Jack Black, one of the featured players is somewhat annoying but Adrian Brody and Naomi Watts are fun to watch.

GOOD NIGHT and GOOD LUCK... historically fraudulent. My young assistant Noreen fell asleep at the end of the first reel ( 20 minutes per reel). Remember, McCarthy emerged from the darkness in 1950 and Margaret Chase Smith that brave lady addressed him in congress that same year and that was the start of the end of  tail gunner Joe. The Murrow program came 4 years later in 1954...so what was the big deal...lots of folks challenged him louder and earlier than these fops a CBS. I don't trust anything George Clooney puts on film. Being a member of the Screen Actors Guild ( SAG) I have seen the memo's this ass has written which are posted on the bulletin board...he is a political idiot  and deserves the old Special Forces chokehold with extreme prejudice !! 

Syriana......    Another George Clooney mess which includes a crummy script artsy hand-held camera affectations, extreme close-ups of elbows, face, light fixtures et al. The murky dialogue was maddening .  I understood the overall concept -  ' evil American oil companies manipulate Arab rulers and create terrorists' the presentation was annoyingly Clooney. Most reviewers are tripping over themselves to praise this sorry, phony, pretentious and third rate imiation of  The Battle of Algiers. Clooney is a spoiled pompous, posturing popinjay,a smug little prince, one hell of a  good actor but a fraudulent filmaker.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.  Written and Directed by Albert Books. This film is doomed to BOMB. The unfunniest man in comedy, even the French show no interest in Albert Brooks. His long suffering expressions and narcissist persona make him hard to tolerate. The only reason I saw this stinker is that I received it on DVD  from the Screen Actors Guild. A companion piece to this dog would be a trailer featuring Karen Hughes on her good will mission to the Middle East.

THE NEW WORLD  directed by TERRENCE MALICK. 

Recreating the founding of Jamestown in 1607 . Pocahontas fully commands the  screen. Malick distills both Pocahontas naivete and John Smiths worldliness in quietly spoken interior monologues. Their secret thoughts comprise the films  voice-over narration. History with grace...and a beautifiul closing scene in which Pocahontas frolics with her child among the geometric topiaries and hedge mazes of an English Estate. This film is a rebuke to artful cynicism and to Malicks formalist but un-Kubrickian style. 5 STARS out of 4        

OCEAN' S  13.................Bring Air Wick along to the theatre , this one stinks

MICHAEL CLAYTON    another George Clooney package of B.S...... Clooney a talented actor can't seem to stay away from nostalgia looking back to the 50's 60's and 70's in order to reveal something pertinent to todays social issues. The problem with Clooney is that he tries to portray everyman while unable to wipe the millionaire smirk off his mug. Being a member of the Screen Actors Guild, I am sometimes embarassed by this political moron. In this film, we see over intense actors in scene after scene hyping it up in shadowy settings meant to convey some unnamable fear but these preciously staged situations didn't work 40 years ago and do not work now. Clooney is constantly coasting on his snarky narcissism . It seems to me that Clooney is trying to remake ' Three Days of the Condor', or ' The Parallax View' but sorry George you've got no taker here. Personally, I think George suffers from " everyone is more corrupt than me "