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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 32.91%
Worth A Look: 16.46%
Just Average: 39.24%
Pretty Crappy: 6.96%
Sucks: 4.43%
10 reviews, 98 user ratings
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| Girl, Interrupted |
by Erik Childress
"Two Hours vs. Two Years - Who Lost More?"
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Girl Interrupted – (* ½) – “I wasted two years of my life,” says Winona Ryder’s character near the end of Girl Interrupted. “I wasted two hours of mine,” was my response to that. Girl Interrupted strives to be an estrogen-laced version of “Cuckoo’s Nest” but resembles more of a sleeping pill, and the more times you see it the more likely you’ll end up in an institution.No movie in recent times comes to mind that seemed to have no point whatsoever. And that’s not something you’ll be able to pick up on until well into the film, because it does contain some good performances and the promise of something interesting to come. Problem is, it never comes. All we’re left with then is yet another autobiographical drama where the writer wouldn’t be interesting in the slightest if she hadn’t written the damn book. And it’s this character that Winona Ryder plays in a surprisingly decent performance, even if the character itself is an incredible bore, preaching none of the intelligence it would take for her to become a writer like she’s always telling everyone. Whoopi Goldberg plays the nice version of Nurse Ratched, lending support throughout to Ryder’s bore, until pulling a temporary 180 out of the blue telling her that she’s “tired of this shit!!!” Angelina Jolie turns in yet another wild child performance, the female equivalent of Randall McMurphy, and she’s very good. But in the overall scheme of the movie it’s merely full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The film is so full of nothing, in fact, that the Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo and Mike Nelson parts of me were coming out big time during the film’s final hour calling attention to Jeffrey “Hank ‘Hey Now’ Kingsley” Tambor and waiting for ping pong balls to expel out of Winona’s…well, you get the idea. It becomes apparent that a major chop job was done on this film, as several scenes from the trailer are nowhere to be found. What also is nowhere to be found is the one thing that kept me going throughout the entire nothing that goes on in this film. It was reported back in October that this film was to contain Winona Ryder’s first nude scenes. Hey, bonus I thought. Or maybe it was boner. Either way, my eyes were wide open with anticipation until the movie was over and I realized I had seen nothing but a little side-view from the back chest shot and a wet gown in the bathtub. If these are what Winona qualifies as nude scenes, then her acting ability is beginning to make a whole lot of sense.Girl Interrupted has none of the inner depth of Cuckoo’s Nest, which savaged the system of institutions and warned of the danger of calling any individual crazy or sane. The 1999 version seemed like the perfect opportunity for a metaphor of the disenfranchised youth and a chance for more whining from the twenty-somethings crying out for misunderstanding them, even if the film is set during the sixties. There isn’t much to say about a film that doesn’t have much to say and it looks as if my “worst of ‘99” list was made a tad too soon.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1814&reviewer=198
originally posted: 02/14/00 16:16:46
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USA
21-Dec-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
20-Jan-2000
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