Oh man how I waited for this movie. ever since i heard about it a while back I longed to see it. than I did. There is only one real problem with INDEPENDENCE DAY. it's a bad bad film. it lacks a few basic ingridients like a script, a director, and some characters to make it work .trying to be a 50's alien movie, and a 70's disaster movie at the same time, it fails on both counts. it lacks the playfullness and sheer hilarity of the low budgeted 50's b movies. and the real drama and characters of 70's movies like the TOWERING INFERNO. It's not even bad enough to laugh at, which is one of the saddest aspects. Yes the effects are magnificent. there are a few minutes footage of big cities being destroyed that are alone worth the price of admission. these scenes happen about a third into the movie and things fall downhill from there. The thing that really bugged me about the whole thing is the fact that everyone involved with it admits freely that it is dumb. the producer, director(who are alsot he screenwriters), and stars all thought it was a really dumb script. why didn't they work on it a bit more than?, why didn't they bring a real writer? making something and freely admitting it's bad is not an excuse.

to quote terry the jerk from "friends", it's not that this movie is bad. it's so bad that it makes me want to stick my finger into my brain and twist it. nothing works about this film. an awful script, bad acting, bad directing, and probably the worst pacing of any movie ever released. this is probably the dullest action movie ever. with almost no action sequences, and characters you couldn't care less about, this hit the bottom of my list, and apperently I wasn't alone. that was the first time I expirienced total hate from an audience towards a movie. a complete waste of everyone's time.

after the huge rush of movies about women hanging around talking, it's fun to see a man's movie shaped the same way. this movie looks at a month in the life of three irish catholic brothers living in new york. in this particular month one of them gets out of college, the other leaves his girlfriend, and they both move in with their older brother and his wife. this movie takes a look at big things like family, love, and religion in a small minor way. some trully funny moments, and tons of witty and fun dialouge, makes this a great way to pass an hour and a half. director and screenwriter ed burns also plays one of the three brothers and naturally gives himself all the best lines.

this is a truly wonderful movie. it uses the real story of two teenage girls, who murdered the mother of one of them, to examine human relationships. paula is a quiet imaginative girl in new zealand of the 1950's. she befriends juliet, a new girl from england. their friendship gets tighter and tighter, and they start to develop an imaginary world of their own. feeling that no one in the outside world understands them, they become more and more dependent of each other. things look wonderful to the girls , until their parantes start to belive that the relationship is unhealthy. this begins the story spiraling downwards, towards the catastrophy that awaits them all. the two girls are as human as any characters put on screen. they are not bad or evil. they are beutiful, weak, confused, powerful, ridiculous, ugly, and misguided. in short they are like you or me. this makes everything oh so more powerful. peter jackson is an amazing director, who can do absloutley anything he puts his mind to. he started in the 80's with a couple of the grossest horror movies ever filmed. being considred one of the best directors in the horror genre, he decided to make this film, a small art house movie that caught a whole new audience. his latest movie "the frighteners" , a horror movie starring michael j.fox and produced by robert zemeckis is now doing big buisness in the states.