Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Strong casting helps weak script., September 7, 2005
I decided to buy this dvd after seeing how many good actors had supporting roles and cameos in it(Margaret Cho, Mike Myers, Robin Ruzan, Ben Stiller, Tim Meadows, etc.), and because Strangers With Candy/Second City alums David Pasquesi and Mitch Rouse were in it. Well, individually, all these people are pretty funny, and in the movie they play what they're given pretty well, but something is missing. Most times you'll have to make an effort to laugh. I think the problem is the script -the plot isn't too compelling and the situations it produces are lacking some driving force.
However, since I am a fan of some of the actors, just seeing them play their roles was interesting, and enough reason to keep watching. It isn't the best dvd I ever bought, but it's a part of my collection now and I'm satisfied with it.
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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I have NEVER hated a movie as much as this one, August 11, 2006
You need to see this movie to believe how god-awful it is. It must be one of the worst movies ever made. I'll give the marketers credit - they knew everyone would hate this movie, so they designed the DVD case to appeal to people like me. I found this movie at the bottom of a bin of cheap DVDs. I normally never buy a DVD without seeing it first. In some cases I will hear good things about a movie I never saw and buy it anyway, because I figure it will suit my tastes. I had never heard of this movie. The DVD case bragged about the all-star cast of this movie. I was familiar with most of the actors, and the brief summary of the movie sounded funny. It also bragged about an award winning 10 minute short film included on the DVD. The DVD was dirt cheap, so I bought it.
I can now admit that I missed a few clues that should have tipped me off into knowing this movie sucks. On the back of the case it boasts of star Alanna Ubach's talent by saying she starred in Beakman's World. The star of a feature film wouldn't boast about being in a show like that - unless the star actually had nothing of greater value to boast about. And the short movie didn't win an Oscar as I had presumed. Upon closer inspection I saw that it won the 2nd Annual French Online Film Fest, which doesn't even sound like a real award. But there was no way I could have known that all those recognizable actors have very little screen time in the movie, because they're given a higher billing than the main characters (with the exception of Ubach).
Ubach plays Sarah, and whenever she's onscreen she's trying to secure funding for her movie. Nobody likes her script, and everyone keeps trying to get her to make changes to it. The script is about her cousin Jimmy (David Pasquesi) and his friend Virus (Mitch Rouse), who were sent to prison for armed robbery. The biggest mistake that director William Tannen makes in Nobody Knows Anything is deciding to do the whole "movie within a movie" thing. Whenever Sarah starts describing the plot of her movie, it cuts to Jimmy and Virus, so we are technically watching Sarah's movie whenever those two twits are onscreen. If Sarah's movie was any good, then I wouldn't hate Nobody Knows Anything so much. But the "movie within a movie" makes the viewer feel like they're watching two awful movies at the same time.
There's a few other major problems with this movie. Ubach, Pasquesi, and Rouse are the main actors in the movie. The three of them can't act and they're annoying as hell everytime they're onscreen. Tannen and company probably knew they were making a crappy movie, so they got a long list of well-known and talented actors to appear in the movie so that the audience wouldn't notice how horrible this movie is. And their little trick might have worked, if not for one problem - none of the popular/talented actors were any good in this movie. Everyone and everything about this movie is awful. Nobody Knows Anything is an unbelievably boring, humorless, and stupid movie. The viewer has no interest whatsoever in Jimmy's life, or in Sarah's attempts to make a movie about Jimmy.
I heard that this movie is supposed to show that no one knows what it takes to make a successful movie. In this movie, success is defined by how much money a movie brings in. Supposedly, Sarah wants to find out how to make a successful movie. It seems to me that she doesn't care about success, she just seems to want to make her movie regardless of whether it makes money or not. She seems to think that her movie will make money as long as it gets made, and she seems to be extremely reluctant to make any significant changes to her script. Then she gets increasingly frustrated as everyone keeps telling her that the script sucks. I don't believe that movie executives are clueless when it comes to success in the movie industry. They can pretty much tell ahead of time whether or not a movie will make money. They aren't always right - but they are more often than not. It's not their fault if they can't finance a good movie when they know no one will want to see it. But Sarah's script was crap to begin with, and wouldn't have made any money. If anything, the executives' suggestions would have made her movie better. I think we're supposed to be rooting for Sarah to get her movie made the way she wants to make it. But not me - I hoped Sarah's movie wouldn't get off the ground, and that someone would brutally murder Jimmy and Virus. Does Sarah get her movie made? Yes, but only because her uncle made the necessary arrangements. By the end of Nobody Knows Anything, she's still convinced that it's a great movie. Is the joke supposed to be that everyone knows her movie is crap and she doesn't? I don't know. I don't care either. Perhaps Tannen argues that Sarah's movie is successful just because she managed to get it made. If that's the case, Tannen has much to learn about success.
I'd love to hear a director's commentary where Tannen would say what he thinks about this movie. But Nobody Knows Anything is so horrible, Tannen's probably too ashamed to do a commentary. I sure as hell wouldn't be bragging about this movie. He probably can't bring himself to publicly admit how abysmal this movie is. And he probably can't pretend that he's proud of this movie. He'd probably say this movie is supposed to suck so that its message becomes more effective - "No one knows how to make a successful movie, and neither do I. The joke's on you."
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