Friday, March 21, 2003

BOYCOTT CUBA: And the laughs just keep on coming. Not from Boat Trip; from the reviews of Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr's latest.

From Roger Ebert:
"Boat Trip" arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a movie made for nobody, about nothing.

Elvis Mitchell:
"Boat Trip," which opens nationwide today, is a series of flashing semaphores that signal its dreariness. It has the most exhausted collection of song clichés this side of a Time-Life oldies collection, from James Brown's "I Feel Good" all the way to the eventual cover of "I Will Survive." What's missing from this motley medley is a tune by Cuba Gooding Sr.: "Everybody Plays the Fool."

The junior Gooding has shown himself to be a game actor, and he is fearless at throwing his entire being into pictures that seem to exist to prove that he can be in something worse than the last movie you saw him in. If "Boat Trip" were screened on a cruise ship, most of the passengers would be dog-paddling back to shore.

"Boat Trip" is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.

The Orange County Register:
OK, Mort Nathan, wherever you are, here's the deal: I have about $2,000 in checking, a couple of long-term, high-yield CDs and a brutalized 401k account with roughly the same net worth as Tom Cruise's haircut. It's all yours if you promise never, EVER to step behind a movie camera again.

Then again, maybe I have nothing to worry about. The work offers won't exactly be pouring in once the general public sees what a lowbrow, oversexed, witless bore you've made of "Boat Trip," starring Cuba Gooding Jr. The things you do with the double entrendre are just appalling, pal. If I ever a hear woman tell her masseuse, "I want you to go really deep this time" again, please kill me.

Says the Washington Times:
If Oscar statues were animate, the one belonging to Cuba Gooding Jr. would have jumped off its mantel perch and gone AWOL a long time ago.

Just take a quick look at the guy's post-"Jerry Maguire" resume: the unintentionally funny "Instinct," the maudlin "Men of Honor," the preposterous "Chill Factor." And Disney's "Snow Dogs" — you forgot about that turkey, didn't you?

Enter "Boat Trip," Mr. Gooding's latest vehicle.

The time for diplomacy has passed. The time for action has come.

Someone needs to go on a mission of mercy. Someone needs to stage an intervention and rescue that supporting-actor trophy from a lifetime of shame and ill repute.

As far as View From The Top is concerned . . . well, let The Oregonian's Shawn Levy preview what's to come later today:
If the new I-wanna-be-a-stewardess picture "View From the Top" were an airplane, it would blow up on takeoff. If it were an airline meal, it would infect you with E. coli. If it were a parachute, it would be riddled with holes.

I'm not here to tell you that "View From the Top" is moviemaking at its absolute worst. Any veteran critic knows that there's always a bottom beneath the bottom you think you've hit. But I am here to tell you that this picture comes so close to the absolute worst that I could swear I could feel the bottom with the tip of my big toe while watching it.

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