william cook...whoever you are...you rock!

so, in my never ending quest to find new ways to procrastinate i found myself going through customer reviews of products on amazon.com. this adventure, as it were, led me to reviews of tony kushner's play made into an hbo movie: "angles in america." many of the reviews were really good and a lot of the criticisms seemed to me resonable. however, there are some insane people out there who wrote some pretty scary stuff. how can you rent (or worse, buy) a movie simply based on the cover...watch it over and over and then write a review saying that you wanted to puke? or complain the you were fooled by the cover and thought that it was about "angels"? the depth of humanity's utter stupidity amazes me sometimes (strike that..all of the time).
However, i did fine one comment in particular so great that i had to post it.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

It's Just a Title, June 8, 2006
Reviewer: William Cook (Cleveland, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

Reading these reviews, I was surprised by a number of the comments but most of all by those that rented/bought this movie believing it was somehow about "angels" and then had the nerve to complain that they didn't know what it was about or that there were no angels in the movie.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer some advice to those that may inadvertently rent/buy other movies:

There are no Cuckoo birds and no nests in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
There is no obvious wind in Gone With the Wind and what there was didn't blow anything away
There are few, if any, good fellas in Goodfellas
There are no lambs in Silence of the Lambs
Chinatown isn't set in a town in China
There is neither $1,000,000 nor a baby in Million Dollar Baby
You guessed it, no bulls in Raging Bull
The coats are made of denim or some such material in Full Metal Jacket
Paul Newman's body temperature is about 98.6 degrees just like the rest of us in Cool Hand Luke
There is little, if any, sleeping in The Big Sleep
The prison hallway is only a few feet long in The Green Mile
The African Queen is not about a gay black man
No waterfowl were hurt in the making of Duck Soup
The earth rotated as usual on the Day the Earth Stood Still
There are actually multiple conversations in The Conversation
The raunchy men's magazine does not appear in The Hustler
Nobody inherited the wind in Inherit the Wind. It still belongs to all of us
There is no discernible odor while watching The Sweet Smell of Success
All the President's Men is only about *some* of the president's men

I hope that some will find these simple reminders useful. If not, you may want to consider looking at the back of a DVD case, visiting your local library or going to one of the thousands of web sites that talk about every movie ever made.

As for this film, if you're not frightened by things that might be different than what you've experienced or that perhaps strike too close to home, and don't spend your time judging how everyone else lives, then there is much to love about this work. It may not be perfect, and there can be many legitimate gripes about it, but overall it's very, very good. Scan through the positive reviews here and you'll get a good sense of it. No need for me to repeat it all here. Unfortunately, most (but not all) of the negative reviews are just those with some sort of political/religious agenda to put forth instead of commenting on the film.

william cook...you rock!