The Good Shepherd -- "It's a gas!"

I honestly can't review this film as it would be like trying to review a 'day in the life' in North Korea. There's just no way to see it to report on it accurately. Oh, we know it's there, but we simply can't get a good view of it. You see, I tried to watch this movie. Maybe it was good. I can't tell you, because I actually slept through the first two hours. Perhaps therein lies the review. I just could not maintain consciousness while it was playing. I'm not sure if it was a movie so much as it was gas. It was like trying to fight off the affects of anethesia. I would occasionally skim the surface of consciousness or perhaps leave my body and float over the scene and watch myself watching "The Good Shepherd", but I would quickly drift off after glimpsing the expressionless Matt Damon in his horn-rimmed glasses.

Here are some things I DO KNOW that do relate: 1) Weighing in at 2 hours and forty or fifty-some minutes, this breaks the "This is NOT the TITANIC" rule. 2) It breaks the "Boring is NOT drama" rule. Matt Damon does a stunning performance as a walking corpse. And I am totally serious here. If there was an academy award for "most expressionless and void-of-all-humanity" performance, it would go to him, hands-down. And, as an actor, I realize this truly is a difficult task to get through and pull off. Trouble is, as an audience member it was equally as painful to 'get though' since he did pull it off.

"This is NOT the TITANIC" rule: "Thou Shalt not make any movie longer than two hours." As George Bernard Shaw once apologized: "Forgive me for writing a long letter but I did not have time to write a short one." You see, it takes time to SCULPT, CRAFT, and create true art (and craftsmanship.) I would say that's exactly how we separate art from reality. We must 'take away' to reveal the diamond from the muck. We must condense! That's how we get brilliant pigments, luscious perfumes, decadent sauces, and high-quality liquor (well, actually even low-quality rotgut.) Essays, books, TV, pod-casts, and movies all require condensing. Seasoned movie-makers like to call this EDITING. It's sheer arrogance to hold an audience hostage in the name of 'art' when it's merely either sloppy, lazy or un-craftsman-like film making. (Can you imagine if a carpenter did NOT cut his wood while building a house? He just kept nailing it together? Would 'more' be considered better? Would anyone think such a hideous frankenstein-like creation could be called a house?) One must WEED the garden, else it becomes a jungle. --DID YOU KNOW: It's bad-form and an immediate REJECT to submit a script that is over 120 pages in length? (1 script page theoretically translates to 1 minute screen time.) In fact, most professional, insider, Hollywood advise is to keep that baby around 90 pages -- no script reader will touch it if it's barely into three digits. Why then is the script allowed to bloat and take on grotesque proportions as it evolves to the screen. (And paper is cheap! Screen time isn't! And, dammit, my time is valuable too!) Perhaps it's the director's 'vision' that's seemingly so obscure and erratic that he can't FOCUS the image on the screen, rather he splatters it along for hour after hour.

EXCEPTION: Well, TITANIC, of course! It IS the TITANIC! The only exception to this rule that I have ever seen is the Movie TITANIC. Perhaps it's because it was seemingly two movies artistically, craftily, and ingeniously woven into one. --WHATEVERHAPPENED to: "It's better to quite early and leaving them wanting for more rather than end late and keep them wishing it were over?" Perhaps that was just advise back in the 'old theatre' days.

"Boring is NOT drama" rule: It's very dangerous and un-adviseable to ever make a 'drama' (movie, play, story, etc) about anything that is either un-emotional or boring. Actually, 'dangerous' implies drama. So when I say dangerous, I actually mean stupid and extremely selfish. At the risk of boring you, here's a little story: I belong to a writers and actors workshop wherein writers bring in material they are working on (a kind of lab) so that the actors can execute the piece to help in the writing process. Invariably, every month there's some avant-garde "auteur" that decides it would really be 'fresh' and 'different' to put up a piece about how mundane life is...or perhaps how most 'real' communication is boring. And they always defend the work as being reflective of 'real life'-afterall, it is 99.99% boring punctuated by moments of interest. Well, here's the news-flash: that .01% is the main ingredient to a dramatic work. After all, that's why we call it drama. Oh the irony that some writers declare, nay, exclaim, that they can produce fire from water. Rule-Of-Thumb: Do not revolve a dramatic work around subjects of boredom, monotony, mundane-matters, or characters around expressionless or emotionless people. You will end up with the same. Yes, you might label this Andy Warholian approach 'experimental', but then make sure the movie has this warning on it. Trust me, ain't no one runnin' out to see 'experimental' anything. We know it's code for 'boring', as creative as it might be.