*** Official GIGLI Review Thread (1 Viewer)

[Robert Crawford]

This thread is now the Official Review Thread for "Gigli". Please post all HTF member reviews in this thread.

Any other comments, links to other reviews, or discussion items will be deleted from this thread without warning!

If you need to discuss those type of issues then I have designated an Official Discussion Thread.



Crawdaddy

 

[Scott Weinberg]

OK, I'll break the seal.

Gigli :star: out of 5

All Come and Worship at the Feet of Our God Vanity!

People often comment on how the obsession with (and power of) money (huge, overflowing truckfuls of money) can turn a potentially intriguing movie into a shitpile appropriate only for the lowest common denominator of devoted movie freaks. I see dozens of examples of lazy, shoddy filmmaking every year. But there's a force out there more devious and disgusting than the search for money, and it has had its hand in more historically wretched films than greed ever has. This force is Vanity, and if there's anything in the universe more nauseating than two mega-wealthy wankers who create a motion picture solely to show the world how wonderful they are, I have yet to come across it. For this weekend, though, we're offered Gigli.

How many different ways could a movie go wrong? Thousands, probably, although few films in existence come as close to cornering the market on awfulness as Gigli does. This is a film that exists for no other reason save the astonishing egos and rampant self-admiration that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck clearly share. This is a real-life couple so sure that we love them as much as they clearly do that they've created an entire 2-hour valentine to one another.

I find it hysterical that celebrities-in-love will try to sue those who snap photos at their mega-swank weddings, yet will then turn around and offer the planet a 124-minute reel of themselves begging for attention. "Look how I am with my shirt off!" says Ben. "Watch me try to enunciate words like "va-gi-na" while I spread my thighs for the camera!" coos J. Lo. It's like going to a party where you're required to look at (and talk about) the two hosts - and if you dare look away or change the subject - you're tossed out on your ass.

How a generally reliable director like Martin Brest got sucked down into this vortex of public masturbation is anyone's guess, and I pity poor Kevin Smith (who has the duo in his upcoming Jersey Girl and right about now must be pulling huge tufts of hair out of his scalp) for falling into the Hollywood Royalty trap - but here's the straight scoop: Gigli is so uncommonly bad that it may supplant Ishtar as everyone's favorite cinematic whipping boy.

I was about an hour into Gigli before I started wondering what it was about. Needless to say, that's not exactly a good sign. It seems to be about two mafia contractors who are hired to babysit the retarded brother of an unseen federal prosecutor. OK, fine. That could be a viable Act I conceit...but that's pretty much all Gigli has to offer in the plot department. This flick deserves an award for delivering the world's first two-hour one-act movie.

Set aside the astonishingly flimsy plot, and what we're left with is an unending series of sexual conversations between real-life lovers Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Imagine you've planted a microphone inside their limo and you're now privy to private celebrity conversations about genital warts and blocked colons, and you'd be halfway to understanding how aggravatingly smug, distasteful and obnoxious Gigli is. Then keep in mind that you paid eight bucks for the honor.

The flick stops dead for any number of awful reasons:

1. Every 40 minutes, Brest jams in a jarring cameo from one of his Hollywood buddies. Some see these fleeting moments as welcome respites from the ceaseless keening of the two leads, but it's much, much worse than that. Christopher Walken pops up in a scene that reminds us how damn entertaining the guy can be...without him actually doing much of anything entertaining. (It's a good performance only by default.) Lainie Kazan gets to do that "in her sleep" schtick of overbearing Italian Mama. And Al Pacino bellows and spittle-storms his way through a performance so clueless and irritating that you actually start to feel bad for the poor guy. (That Pacino's character is CLEARLY not on the same set as Jen & Ben - and that his parade through the room is done through the magic of CGI - gives one a clear indication of how shoddily constructed this movie really is.)

2. Jen wants to ar-tick-yoo-late. She's arguably the worst actress on the planet. Were it not for a winning smile and the world's plumpest rump, she'd be sharing a trailer with Tara Reid on the set of some amazing new direct-to-video tittie comedy. How this gal, among SO MANY great actresses, has earned this type of Hollywood power is simply too distressing a question to contemplate. Never before has one person accomplished so much using only her ass. And as far as Gigli goes, she's monumentally bad. In an effort to feign intelligence, Lopez talks slowly and melodically, as if every in the audience is a dribbling moron - and her character is nearly always seen reading a book. Yep, a book. I'll bypass her frequent dabblings in 'raunch talk' and one painful scene in which she tries to reference something in Chinese, but here's the deal: you won't see a more hatefully smug performance this year.

3. A silly retard! Nothing serves a film better than employing a potentially endearing character who can change his personality at the screenwriter's every whim. At one moment the couple's charge is shrieking and smacking himself scarily; later on he's nearly lucid. Most often he's just there for flimsy comic relief. Because nothing in the world is funnier than rap music delivered with a Down's Syndrome inflection.

I hate to join the unending parade of critical debasement this movie's earned. Knowing full well that it's the latest Mega-Monstrosity could allow me to approach the flick with a charitable attitude. Surely "I" could find something worthwhile in this movie, right? Er, no. Gigli is precisely as awful as everyone's been saying, and it's a sad state of affairs when a 2+ hour parade of blatant self-adoration can pass for an actual movie.

I've seen worse movies this year, but none in which the intended audience is treated in such a casually dismissive fashion. Gigli looks like a project that was intended for appreciation by precisely two people in the entire universe: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. For their sake, I hope they buy a lot of tickets.

 

[Joshua_Y]

Ya know...I saw this film yesterday and didnt feel that it was deserved of all the backlash...I dont understand why people dont like it...you've got two charming leads who work very well together...great cameo's and a well written story...thats the film I saw...I didnt see the Ben and Jlo movie...I saw a damn good movie from Martin Brest...

8.5/10

 

[Nicholas Vargo]

Sorry to resurrect this thread a month later, but I just saw Gigli to find out how bad it was and boy, I was quite surprised....

GIGLI

**1/2 out of *****

'Gigli' is not exactly what everyone has been making it out to be. Sure, I hate Jennifer Lopez just as much as the next person, and Ben Affleck is in the middle of tarnishing his own ego, but when I saw down to watch this for FREE and at 9:00 this evening, I was hoping the critics were wrong.

In a way, I was wrong, but not exactly...

'Gigli' looks so promising in the beginning when you see the people who were involved behind it. Martin Brest directing. Robert Elswit (with his A.S.C. credit) photographing it, and John Powell doing the music. It seemed like the perfect kind of movie.

But parts of the movie are so contrived and unrealistic, that I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be laughing or what. I saw this with a half-full audience, and I usually laughed when they did, just to save myself from it, and it worked.

I would say that I laughed three times during the film during the main antics, and was completely blown away by Al Pacino in a scene-stealing scene that has to be seen to be believed. I also liked the monologues about how the penis is better than the vagina and vice versa. They seem to be told with such believability that it almost makes you forget about the other problems the movie has.

Almost...

The ending is the most excruciatingly painful ending I have ever sat through. It seemed to go on forever, and although the actual closing scenes made up for it, the lead-up was too long to get to it.

The only other thing that makes up for this movie is Robert Elswit's cinematography. Although this is his worst job to date, he seems to put all of the effort to make it a claustrophopic kind of experience, kind of like what was in the 100-times better "Punch-Drunk Love" and although it fails, at least it tries. I'm now happy that he has an A.S.C. credit next to his name because he deserves it.

But its writer-director Martin Brest who will take the major blame. He seems to be creating this Oscar-caliber picture with the music and everything, but it all seems like it is too much. Every time "Gigli" succeeds, it always knows how to fail. Justin Bartha, who plays the retarded kid, does what he can, but it is so painful to watch him act like it, that about half the time, I couldn't understand what he was saying. Rarely, was this character interesting or funny even. I also didn't like his "baywatch" routine, because not only does it slow down the picture, but it inexpicably gets paid off in the end by one of the worst payoffs in cinema history, at least in my opinion.

And what about Affleck and Lopez? There performances are okay, but it seems like they have so much more potential that most of their scenes never pay off, although they try. There best scene is the one featuring Pacino, there "Turkey Time. Gobble Gobble" is a close second.

With time, I may enjoy "Gigli" more, but right now, "it's a bunch of jumbled pieces that just don't fit" as a whole film. The potential is there, but the execution is mediocre at best. It is only worth seeing for Robert Elswit's cinematography and nothing else really, except for a few, cheap meaningless laughs.

--Nicholas Vargo