My Grade	Movie Title	My Review
F	Anniversary Party, The	Who's who? Who are they? What are they, what do they do? Who really cares? DVD jackets lie---I thought this one said "comedy", not "self-indulgent movie-industry navel contemplation." Unfortunately, I already did my bills this week, or I would have done them while this was on. I've said I will always watch any movie all the way through because hope springs eternal that it will improve, but I stopped this at about 0:41 minutes in. Reality TV version of a much too noisy party. Get drunk and watch this and you won't know the difference.
F	Dead, The	All right, all right. Don't throw things. To me, this was "Gosford Park", but without the "interesting" stuff about class differences. And with even less "movement". On the plus side, it was an hour shorter. As with Gosford, I read nothing but the highest praise for this film, and as with Gosford, I thought it really sucked. MAYBE it's just me, but movies that have me squirming from about 10 minutes in (I'm willing to give almost any film a 10-min. chance) all the way to the end is not doing its job, for me, anyway. Maybe it's theater/actor part of me, but the highest crime---no, make that the highest sin---is to bore the audience. And this film is extremely boring. Maybe "The Dead" is better read than filmed, I can't say. Movies like "Eyes Wide Shut" and "In the Bedroom" prove that slow-moving does not necessarily mean boring. Yes, I watch these all the way through to the end, though I'm constantly pressing the remote button that displays the running time to see if it's gonna be over soon. And constantly squirming. Gosford Park, House of Mirth, and The Dead: the Squirm Gang. Is it any coincidence that at least two of these have high-falootin' literary pedigrees???
F	Evita	Several "first's" here!!! To wit: 1) the first movie I absolutely, positively could NOT endure watching all the way through to the end, giving up at about the 1-hour mark; 2) my first "F" that was not due to the movie being dull and boring, (though it was a little of that, too). This one made me grind my teeth; I got a complete physical workout just squirming in my chair for that one hour. I even tried doing bills and other paperwork while I had it on, just to say that I watched all of it, but I couldn't take it even as background noise. You should know that as a theater person I am no great fan of musicals (to put it mildly), though there are 3 that I actually like (The Threepenny Opera, Sweeney Todd, and the movie Moulin Rouge). But this was just awful. First, a musical about a Chilean dictator's wife? I was reminded of "The Producers" and the musical about Hitler. Except "Evita" takes itself seriously!!! There's an absurd "story" told without a single piece of actual, speaking dialogue---everything, and I mean everything, has to be SUNG. You'd think you might get music reminiscent of both its time frame (perhaps swing, circa 1936) and place (Spanish/Latin music), but contemporary electric guitar crap???!!! The anachronistic music that worked so well in "Moulin Rouge" (or even in A. L. Webber's own "Jesus Christ Superstar") is just grating in this pail of slop. This movie consists entirely of that: Broadway slop, tuneless crap with smelly old lyrics. As everything is sung, even filler such as exposition, you get a lot of "dialogue" where different syllables are delivered at different pitches, which is how I would describe it rather than using the word "song" or "singing". And there's a big difference between song lyrics that simply don't rhyme (not an evil in itself) and "Evita"'s putrid lyrics, and between an unhummable tune (not an evil in itself), typically atonal contemporary music, and seemingly random assignment of words and syllables to various notes of the musical scale. Well, I guess this turned into a rant.
F	Gosford Park
F	House of Mirth
F	Pest, The
F	Sidewalks of New York	Totally unbelievable characters, down to their proclaimed ages; totally trite script; half-documentary style is inconsistent, a cop-out, and a miserable failure.
F	War Zone, The	A free rental, rented on a whim, because Tim Roth directed. I was "supposed" to like this---7.4 with over 1,000 votes---but I'm sorry, I can't stand films with 30-second shots of a tree or a chair or whatever. Dull. Really dull. All of my F's have been extremely dull films...