NIKKI says:When I read the synopsis, I thought of Falling Down, the movie where Michael Douglas gets fed up with his day job and starts to go mental. Here, we have Dave Owen, a guy who is so tired of New York City's car alarms disturbing him at random moments in his life, that he goes around smashing windows and cutting battery lines. Obviously, the law is not on his side, and so he finds himself in trouble. Still, Dave has a purpose. He is the only man who believes in keeping the peace.
I enjoyed Dave's story. It was funny, and there were a lot of good discussions throughout the movie about the meaning of peace, and how we struggle for it. I even understood Dave's insanity as I, too, can't stand the incessant and often unnecessary noise of daily life. I close the door at work so I can't hear the voices and the traffic; I often go to sleep with a pillow over my head; I'll turn on a fan to block out noise... Steve and I used to live behind a motorcycle repair shop -- that almost drove us both out of our minds. So, Dave's plight was one I could get behind.
What I didn't enjoy about the film was the cartoonish characterisations of those Dave was up against -- the mayor and his lackey, for instance, played by William Hurt and William Baldwin. What is with Hurt these days? Every film he's in, he seems to be some weird version of his former self, with bizarre hair and a weird voice.
I also didn't like Dave's sexual experimentation while on his mission and separated from his wife. Steve mentioned something about the importance of the discussions going on in those scenes, that they were oddly philosophical, and I did notice that. But I felt jumping from Dave's relatively playful journey into intense sex scenes involving talk of him making a young woman come and the beauty of another woman's "pussy" was just a bit strange. I don't know what those moments contributed. The "pussy" woman spoke of Dave finding a "heaven for the ears" while she wanted a "heaven for her body" (she wanted a more beautiful vagina) -- why couldn't she have been talking about her eyes, or her lips?
Anyway, my prudishness aside... I liked it. It had its faults, but Dave's story was strong enough to overcome those.
3/5
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