Reviews

This does not mean this film was not entertaining and did not hold my attention, but with a little more care devoted to this germ of a terrific story, this film could have been something really amazing instead of the overly stylized ride that takes a little too long to get going.

The Jerry Lundergaard character is a particularly fascinating character because from the second this character appears on the screen and opens his mouth, it's clear that nothing he says is the truth but you can also see where his deceptive nature comes from...it's also clear, more through the Cohens...

The story initially presents one of the characters as sympathetic but the story manipulates viewer sympathy where it is changing approximately every ten minutes of running time.

The story initially unfolds through a series of videotapes that Bob is making for his unborn child, all the things that he feels a father should tell his child and teach his child.

It is clear from the moment Patti and Kelso meet that Patti is attracted to the man, which seems a little icky on the surface since the character is clearly too old for Patti, but Patti's crush is never portrayed as unseemly and we never worry that anything inappropriate is going to happen between P...

Aaron Guzikowski, who also wrote the screenplay for Prisoners, adapted the story from an Icelandic film called Reykjavik-Rotterdam providing a story that takes a little too much time with exposition...a good 30 minutes of the film are spent explaining Chris' former profession to us and how he wants ...

And even though we've spent a good chunk of the story wanting these two to work together, the story suddenly seems to make us want to choose sides and the side we choose changes from scene to scene until the conclusion.

The defiance of storytelling should come as to no surprise since the director, Dan Mazer, who also directed Borat and Bruno, two thoroughly unconventional film comedies and Mazer employs the same manic sledgehammer approach that he did to those Sasha Baron Cohen comedies, taking a razor thin story t...

This was some pretty bold stuff at the time and I'm pretty sure there were a lot of compromises to Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer's screenplay that had to be made to get this story to the screen during the 1950's.

The film also finds time to take a glimpse into Lincoln's personal life, starting with an extremely troubled marriage to the mentally unbalanced Mary, whose mental issues apparently stemmed from the death of their first son, Willie, who died in the war and it is revealed as part of this story that L...