Every Sunday, Gill delves into his archive of over 800 movie reviews and randomly selects three for your enjoyment! Here are this week’s…
Glitter
Glitter is the most cliched and boring version of the “pop star is born” story line that you will ever see. It’s bad right from the start, but I’ll admit that the first twenty minutes had enough silly moments that I hoped it would turn out to be so-bad-it’s-good…but no. Glitter just steadily declines in quality from the moment it starts, and after that first twenty minutes, it drifts past the point of being so-bad-it’s-good and into just straight-up bad territory. It’s boring, the performances are bland, Mariah Carey can’t act her way out of a paper bag, and considering the fact that it took something like four years to get made, the original music in Glitter is totally unremarkable. The only entertaining thing about Glitter is the character called Dice, who is initially Mariah Carey’s manager and boyfriend, but who gets shot off-screen during the final act in a scene that’s supposed to be sad, but fails to resonate on any level. This movie is basically Showgirls without the boobs. It’s bad. Don’t watch it.
1 out of 5
It’s Pat
Oh boy, this film is a disaster. Based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, the “gag” of the Pat character is that you can never tell whether Pat is a man or a woman. That’s it – the only joke. And guess what? The whole movie is based on that incredibly unfunny joke. Ninety minutes of people wondering whether Pat is a guy or a girl. It’s so boring that you’ll want to tear your eyes out within the first five minutes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the character of Pat is obnoxious and utterly unlikeable. Dave Foley co-stars as Pat’s love interest Chris (in drag), and, of course, you never know whether Chris is a man or a woman either. I felt really bad for Dave Foley while I was watching this, because I’ve seen him do comedy in drag on The Kids in the Hall, and it was hilarious. But he’s not given anything to work with in It’s Pat, and that just makes the movie even worse. Apparently Quentin Tarantino did some uncredited rewrites on the script, but you would never know it. In the realm of movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches – a “genre” that is already full of cinematic stinkers – It’s Pat has to be the worst of the bunch.
0 out of 5
Compliance
Writer/director Craig Zobel is out to make you feel uncomfortable, because Compliance is nothing but uncomfortable feelings from beginning to end. Based on a series in incidents in which pranks calls were made to fast food restaurants with the callers pretending to be police officers. Using only the power of their supposed authority, the callers would then convince the managers of these restaurants to strip search and sexually assault innocent employees. The incidents are well-documented and, frankly, terrifying in their implications about human nature in the face of what they think is a figure of power. What’s more, the callers would always insist that they were the ones who would get in trouble, not the restaurant managers, thereby relieving the managers of responsibility for their actions. It’s scary stuff, and Zobel makes great use of it in Compliance, which is basically an amalgamation of the different incidents. Compliance will make you feel dirty and complicit in the actions taking place on screen. You’ll squirm, you’ll feel rotten, and you’ll definitely say “I would never do that.” But the fact that this sort of thing has happened over 70 times proves that, maybe, you would. And that alone is reason to see this film. That being said, I’m not going to be rushing out to watch Compliance again any time soon.
4 out of 5
See you next Sunday for three more thrilling short reviews!