Reviews

SPOILERS? Maybe, but so what?

What started as a ridiculous urban legend (a black market in internal organs) has now been presented as fact in a movie, and judging from some of these reviews, a lot of gullible people have accepted the premise as true.

It's a crock from start to finish. The successful transplantation of organs involves careful genetic matching of donor and recipient, a complete operating theater and a whole crew of trained medical people. (Even then the organs are often rejected.) So who in his right mind would pay for a random kidney -- besides the fictional Hannibal Lector -- and he'd just eat it.

Nobody, that's who. It's never happened and never will.

The poor have REAL problems, and it just confuses the issues to invent fantasy ones for them.

Not that it matters, given the phoney premise, but why stuff the heart down the toilet? Where'd IT come from? They must of disposed of that "donor" some way, why not dispose of the heart along with it?

Totally without credibility and a waste of some pretty fair acting talent.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! AND LOTS OF 'EM!

I remarked to my date upon leaving "One Hour Photo" that it should win an Academy Award for "Best White Paint", including that used upon Robin Williams, who looked blank all through the picture.

Let me see now. This here guy who works as a photo developer in a (white) SavMart, has become fixated on what he perceives as a perfect family judging from the photos he develops. He then gets fired by his meany of a boss because he has been stupid enough to make extra copies of the family's photos to use as wallpaper in his (white) apartment without paying SavMart for them. (The boss, apparently, has taken twelve years or so to figure out that the books don't balance.)

Have I got it right so far?

Meanwhile, Sy has discovered that the husband in this perfect family has been having an affair. And not only THAT, the affair has been chronicled in detail in snapshots! (Taken by... who? Was it one of those manage-a-trois things? If so, is that what Sy is so upset about?)

Anyway, he decides to ruin the lives of his perfect family by making sure the wife learns of her husband's affair, and also decides to scare the bejesus out of his ex-boss by taking pictures of his daughter - and he makes sure the boss knows HE took the pictures so the cops will come after him. (Help! Stop me before I photograph again!)

He then terrorizes the errant husband and his girlfriend at knifepoint and makes them pose for dirty pictures, because... Oh! Of course! HE had had to do the same when he was a child. Which, of course, explains everything. At least for anybody under the age of five. Being over the age of five, my reaction was: "Jeez, talk about being Politically Correct!

OR--- The whole episode with the husband and girlfriend is something Sy made up. OR--- The whole episode with his boss was something Sy made up. OR--- The cops catching and interrogating him (in a dazzling white room) was something Sy made up. OR--- the whole movie was made up by someone who thought "Well, I'm writing about a psychotic, and psychotics are not rational, therefore my movie doesn't have to be rational either. I can't lose!"

And judging by some of the comments I've seen, he was right. Personally, if I want to puzzle out a puzzle, I'll get a puzzlebook. I go to movies in hopes of 1) being entertained, or 2) if I'm very lucky, being enlightened on some aspect of the human condition. (Doesn't happen often.)

But not puzzled. I can do without puzzled.

• namely that "Lonesome Dove" made every other Western I've ever seen, even those I used to like, seem corny.

I loaned it out to a friend. "Six hours?" he said, "I haven't got six hours to waste watching a movie."

Two days later, I got a phone call. "Thanks a lot, buddy," my friend told me, "I watched it all the way through, then started from the beginning and watched it again. Twelve solid hours! And I had other things to do, too!"

It's that good!

How in the world did they do it? How did they fight off the "helpful" execs who must have told them things like: "NO NO NO!. Cowboys never wore hats like that, or carried guns like that. And why don't you shoot it in places with more spectacular scenery, like the National Parks? And why do you insist on taking all that time introducing the characters? And why isn't there more quick draws and fancy gunplay? And how come the good guys don't triumph in the end? And you can't just kill off sympathetic characters like that! Haven't you people ever seen a western movie? YOU JUST CAN'T DO IT THIS WAY!"

But by some miracle, they could, and did.

The fact that Gus and Call ride past the Alamo WITHOUT SAYING A SINGLE WORD ABOUT IT, just stunned me!

Top notch everything! Go anywhere in it, pause it, turn off the color and feast your eyes on the most convincing presentation of the West as it appeared in the 1870s you'll ever see outside a museum.

I am in awe of this masterpiece.

Don't rent it, BUY IT.