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Rating:  -
This 2003 film is set in Montana in the 1950s. The landscape is bleak, depressing and sad. So is the plot, which is about a handful of residents of this small Montana town who refuse to move away in spite of the fact that a new power plant is going to flood the land and put the whole town under water. James Woods is cast a one of the employees of the power plant that needs to flush out the people. Nick Nolte is cast as a priest who resists. Daryl Hannah is cast as a guardian angel. There's a sad, abandoned orphan and cinematography of a graveyard in which all the coffins have to be removed before the land gets flooded. And even though it's filmed in color, it has the feel of colorless black and white.
Immediately, I hated this film.. I wanted to turn it off right away but thought I'd give it a chance. Finally, after just about a half hour, there was no way I could continue watching. Perhaps somebody else might consider this a work of art but I don't. I feel a film has to at least engage my attention. But all I felt was sadness and boredom. Not recommended.
Rating: -
I rented this DVD because I have met the mother of the two young men who produced the film and find her work very good. I couldn't make head or tails out of this film, even after running it several times. I had to resort to reading the film jacket to find out the intention of the producers. If this was to be a representation of regional art and writing, it misses its mark.
Rating: -
OK folks, got some time to kill and brain cells to fry? Try watching Northfork and see if it makes any sense. Imagine surrealist painter Salvador Dali behind a movie camera. That explains this film best.
As far as I could see a town had to be evacuated or it would be flooded with the building of a dam (???) Nick Nolte is a preacher who shoots down an angel, thinking it was a duck. The angel is now a sick young boy that is constantly sick and cannot be adopted.
The boy dreams a lot and he keeps going to this house where four angels live. They are looking for 'the missing one'. One angel is Daryl Hannah, who is bald but wears a Three Stooges Moe wig. The other is Gilbert from 'Revenge of the Nerds', he is the studious type who knows something about everything. Oh yeah, he has wooden hands. There's this real eccentric angel who is not the most macho guy you've ever seen, and a cowboy angel who has no lines. There is also a stick-dog wandering around outside. WHat the heck is a 'stick-dog' you ask? Watch and learn my friends.
Another plot is the government agents trying to move people. The citizens are quite the characters indeed. One guy has two wives and turned his house into a boat, another nailed his feet to the porch and is a bit trigger happy, and we got two young lovers with a nice car.
Somewhere in the middle of all this is a wife and mother who is dead. The boy angel visits her grave, then she's buried in a canyon. But the first scene in the movie is a floating coffin in a river.
Either you have to be really poetic or really stoned to make any sense of this. It left me with a headache.
Rating: -
The first clue that I should have turned off this movie: two of the characters in this film were played by actors appearing in "A Walk to Remember." However, I (regretfully) put aside my intuition and allowed myself to struggle through the awkward puns and transparent acting all for the sake of the haunting beauty of the film. Looking back, I think I would have enjoyed the movie much more had the mute button been on.
What else, you ask, could bring a rational human being to sit for 102 minutes in front of this pretentious picture? Well, "what else" was the question I was asking myself up until the very end. I figured that the movie must redeem itself in the last few frames. Not so. In fact, I feel cheated out of story line, character development, emotional depth, truly thoughtful insight (not just gross ambiguity which some might mistake for deeper meaning), and a feeling of purpose to the film. Worst film experience of the year, and I see a lot of flicks.
Rating:  -
When I sat down to watch this movie I didn't really know what to expect; but this wasn't it. I rented the movie and watched it the first night. By the end of the week I had to see it again. The images and ideas kept rolling around in my head. The second viewing was better than the first.
Though I'm sure a LOT of people will disagree, I liked the pace and the way they cut back and forth between dreams and "reality". If they had had a bigger budget (the whole movie was shot in 24 days) maybe they could have shot more scenes and then edited a slightly more coherent final package. That said, I liked it enough that I'm waiting for some of the "1 star" folks to put their copies up for sale, cheap.
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