Movie Review by Dr Kuma
Starring: Blair Underwood, Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, Catherine Keener
Director: Steven Soderbergh
In my time here working undercover for PHASE9 I’ve had to sit through some really awful films, RAT RACE still haunts me. I dream I’m trapped in a cinema where the film runs 24 hours a day and I can’t get out. Still, it may get worse, in the fictional dream world I sometimes frequent; RAT RACE could be double billed with FULL FRONTAL.
Rarely have I seen a film so boring or up it’s own arse – SUNSHINE STATE comes close – but wow, with a cast list that features Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and David Duchovny, you hope for something. I was. The End.
The story revolves around a film-within-a-film – within-a-film (which has no continuity and looks as though it was shot from inside a vat of glycerin) which revolves around seven people with little in common whose lives collide. Heard it all before? Fine that saves me going through it. All the ‘action’ is set on a Friday, a day, according to one of its actors, “Nothing can go wrong”. I suppose they were right, I sat through this on a Monday.
Really, it may come up in trivia questions as two of the ‘stars’ hardly do anything, one plays a corpse, but hey, at least he wasn’t cut out like Kevin Costner in THE BIG CHILL. My favourite ‘cameo’ however was Terrence Stamp, in role and on screen for 4 seconds (believe me; I was counting the seconds here).
The only thing that’s any good here, bar the acting, which is good, is some of the dialogue.
“I’m swimming in Lake Me” says a spoilt actor, which really could apply to director Soderbergh who’s tried to go back to SEX LIES AND VIDEO TAPE as though OCEANS 11 never happened, but the script had ‘ARTY’ written all over it in a red marker.
This was a major disappointment and I’m now a bit worried that PHASE9 has decided to condemn Dr Kuma to the ‘art house’ circuit or just the plain weird or the ones no one else wants to see to review. Weird I don’t mind, but the really boring are not something that this reviewer is into and I predict that, if word of mouth gets round from sensible reviewers, not “they liked it because they were supposed to” lot, the 25 or so souls that sat through the press preview will be the only ones to suffer this torture.
Dr Kuma’s verdict: DULL frontal. 1 star out of 6 – and that’s for David Duchovny’s erection- I bet Scully opens a file on this soon. Still, it could be method acting, he, after all, plays the stiff.
