Your Donations support the Site

Buy Cranky stuff


Buy Movie Posters

Top Selling DVD     Books

  BLU-RAY DVDs:
The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo
Happy Feet Two
Footloose (2011)
Tower Heist
Angels and Demons
The Rum Diary
Avatar
Batman Begins
Dark Knight
Fifth Element
The Hangover
James Bond 11 disc coll.
Lord of the Rings trilogy
Mission Impossible GP
Sherlock Holmes AGOS
Star Wars Saga
Ultimate Matrix coll
X-Men First Class
X-Men Trilogy
X-Men Wolverine
 BLU-Ray for Family DVDs 
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Bambi
A Bug's Life
Cars
Chronicles of Narnia set
Coraline
Ghostbusters
Harry Potter 1-8 collection
Iron Man 2 combo
Kung Fu Panda
Lord of the Rings Trilogy Pinocchio
Pirates of Caribbean trilogy
Pixar short films
Ratatouille
Shrek the Whole Story
Sleeping Beauty
The Smurfs combo
Snow White & 7 Dwarfs
Star Trek motion pictures set
Star Wars Saga (1-6)
Toy Story combo
Toy Story 2 combo
Toy Story 3 combo
Wall-E SE

Search engine by FreeFind

click to search site

      Now in Release
The Avengers
Bernie
Carnage
Hunger Games
Joyful Noise
Killing Bono
Three Stooges
Trust

TV/Movie Collectibles

Privacy Policy

IN SHORT: All about Life, in a serial killer's own words. . . [Rated [R] ]

On paper, it's a great concept and one which I can't recall seeing before. Here we have Vann Siegert (Owen Wilson), a freshly scrubbed All-American boy with truck, drifting from town to town, meeting new people, making new friends, spiking their drinks with deadly poison and moving on . . .

Writer/Director Hampton Fancher's script (he's best known for writing Blade Runner a zillion years ago) offers us Vann's running commentary on life the universe and everything else as we watch him settle in to a new town, new lodgings and potential new girlfriend, Ferrin (Janeane Garofalo) a co-worker at the US Mail office where he's found work as a sorter. His landlords are Jane (Mercedes Ruehl) and Doug (Brian Cox), whose college age daughter has gone missing and who are themselves bordering on the edge of emotional self-destruction. Rounding off the cast are a pair of imaginary (?) cops (Dwight Yoakam and Dennis Haysbert) who are on the track of this killer. There's enough background in this story to allow you to think the conversations with the cops are Vann's own creation and rehearsal for an eventual arrest, but this is a flick which leaves you with more questions than answers, and doesn't allow any tension to build because there's no sense that the "pursuit" is anything more than imaginary.

I must have been having a bad day, 'cuz my head kept trying to nod off, and neither the script nor performances merited that kind of reaction. The question is: How do you build sympathy for a serial killer? You can't. How do you build tension when there's no visible pursuit? You can't. Minus Man breaks all the traditional rules and knows it -- the ad tag "conversation usually follows" is a perfect description of the kind of post arthouse screening activity that will invariably happen, 'cuz this flick is perfect for the arthouse.

The performances are uniformly good, with a most pleasant surprise being that singer Sheryl Crow holds her own against the seasoned Wilson. Still, the pace is rather slow and the lack of visible tension works against it.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Eight Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to The Minus Man, he would have paid...

$4.00

Pay per view level, and where most of the arthouse flicks rank.

	Click to buy films starring Owen Wilson
	Click to buy films starring Janeane Garofalo
	Click to buy films starring Mercedes Ruehl