Change Your Image
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Reviews
Five Corners (1987)
Laverne & Shirley meet Ed Wood
How can a film with Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins and John Turturro score significantly below a 6? It can't be for lack of funding because for some reason they licensed a Beatles song for the opening and closing. It is more complex than that.
First, take a writer (one who would (much) later win an Academy Award), and have him write a screenplay in which everyone has to use the patois of his native Bronx (and set it at a time he was 14 in that neighborhood). Task him with, what? Coming up with a dark comedy serial killer film? Filled with hackneyed dialogue spoken by cardboard characters, particularly the subplot of the Laverne & Shirley girls and the police? Try to add some social relevance by having some connection with the mid-60s civil rights movement (what he was going for there would require much more thought than anyone seems to have given this film). Then take a TV director and tell him to use every cliche in the book. But don't stop there. Have every actor over-act so that until the end one cannot figure out whether to laugh (for a failed serious story) or cry (for an inept comedy).
Oh, and let's not forget the dog. A Saint Bernard who leads a posse of good guys and police to the very slow afoot psycho who is carrying his love/victim with a gait taken from Boris Karloff's Frankenstein. It gives it that Disney feeling. Something for everyone in the family!
I cannot imagine that Foster, Robbins or Turturro could believe that they were ever in a worst movie. This is the kind of train wreck you would get if you tried to put Dressed to Kill on TV in 1964. Maybe that's what they were going for: Some meta-statement on film and TV and American culture in the mid-1960s? That's the best I could say for it.
The Suite Life of Zack & Cody (2005)
Word to parents
I stumbled upon this entry looking for an actor. I expected to see uniformly negative reviews (if any at all; the show is really not worth the effort). But I see so many positive reviews that I can only conclude that it is part of a coordinated effort by Disney to promote this garbage. If Disney doesn't directly write the favorable reviews, it at least creates the zombie-like following that actually recruits others into the Disney grave of imagination. I, therefore, thought it important to provide an adult point of view.
I agree with the reviewers who are almost speechless in their attempt to explain what trash this series is. It has to be directed by people who failed film school. If you were to compile the very worst mannerisms of the very worst American sit-coms of the past 2 or 3 decades, you would define the style of the direction of this mess. And I cannot imagine what kind of "adults" sit around writing the "zingers" that the kids mouth to adults. If you think your job is dreary, imagine being a writer for this program.
The writing is bad even by Disney standards. A friend of mine told me he was at a business conference where Disney was held up as an example of good branding. You always know what you are going to get from Disney -- like McDonalds; the quality is within a very narrow band. But I swear either the quality monitors failed to read scripts or the quality band must be ratcheting down at that "Entertainment" Complex. All I can say is that to be a Disney writer, you must have to check your self-respect at the door.
But here is what is really disturbing for parents. The characters are horrible, and yet somehow made to appear cute to 'Tweens. Disney evidently has some study about how to mesmerize 'Tweens. I have yet to see a 'Tween that watches this show regularly that doesn't ape the mannerisms of some of the characters.
But it's worse than that. The kids on the show have a contemptuous view of adults, all of whom are stupid, mean (and stupid), vain, or have character flaws. And all of them can be manipulated by the kids -- who despite doing vile, deceitful, immature things are always forgiven because they are "cute."
And all the little viewers who become addicted to this mess will soon be mimicking that very same manner towards adults.
I saw my own kids (when they were 8) start to come up with "sit-com" type "quips" at me and others and I was bound to find out where it came from. I watched everything they saw on TV until I identified the source as this very despicable program.
While watching many (ugh!) Disney program I also noticed that Disney is really not an entertainment company any more. It is simply a vast licensing and cross-promoting marketing organization. It is so vast and so effective that I feel sorry for those ad execs who tried to get kids to eat sugary cereal in the 60s -- how much they could have made had they known what Disney knows now.
As a result of the "experience" of watching Disney, I banned the channel from my kids' permitted viewing. As a "liberal" I was reluctant to do it (and even admit it), not just because I naturally believe in free speech but because I was not convinced that TV affects behavior -- until I saw what this program did to kids. After several weeks of not watching this trash, my kids returned to relative normal, although there is still an occasional relapse a year later. (I wonder if they were able to ditch the behavior so quickly because I nipped it in the bud -- you might not have such luck if you allowed long-term damage to be done.) Since then I've mentioned my banning to others, and I've found among the parents who actually watched what their kids watched, universal agreement. Parents who watch Suite Life are uniformly horrified at what it signals to kids -- cheap, unfunny writing, delivered by untalented children and worse adults, directed by robots programmed from some inane formula as something worth aspiring to. It is a shame. It is an entirely new and qualitatively different form of "dumbing down."
It is also disturbing to find a common theme of most Disney programs that happiness involves becoming a pop idol, and that this goal is neither impractical nor difficult. But that is an entire other screed.
I cannot urge you strongly enough to watch at least one episode, and decide whether your children should be exposed to it.