Rating: 
Summary: Pseudo/quasi/wanna-be...
Review: First, only pseudo intellectuals are trite enough to accuse others of being pseudo-intellectuals. It's simply taking the easy way out. An intellectual does not take the easy way out. Hal Hartley does not take the easy way out. The same goes for quasi-artistes and wanna-be critics. I agree with "Stuart Scott". If you need it all spelled out for you, who are you to criticize another's intellect? Henry Fool asks, and answers the question "what is art", in a provocative manner. It's at once beautiful and pretentious, like all good art. We have a poseur extraordinaire: Henry Fool, and an "all too obviously talented" poet: Simon Grimm, using one another, as is the traditional arrangement between the ambitious and the gifted, to advance their own positions in the outer world while learning of their own significance in their own inner world. No punches are pulled, no notoins left unexplored here. This is the workshop: where the real art behind the art is made. Anyone who can't appreciate this is a pseudo/quasi/wanne-be fool of epic porportions and miniscule importance. Okay, that's mean. Sorry. But two words for the person who thought a white working class poet was "unrealistic", and then thought the movie was "pseudo artistic". First, since when does Art have to be realistic? Are you a bolshevik? Second, Have you ever heard of Charles Bukowski? Or Jim Carroll? Or Henry Miller? Jeez, you put pearls before swine and look what happens. Sorry, mean again. And trite too.
Rating: 
Summary: A MASTERFUL WORK OF CINEMA
Review: For those who lost patience with this film, you missed experiencing a modern classic. The acting, pace, charactors, and especially the dialogue has left me spellbound. (By the by, I rented this film because it co-starred America's finest actress, Parker Posey--she did not disappoint.)
Rating:
Summary: '98's Most Overlooked Masterpiece
Review: Hailing from Cannes with a Best Screenplay Award, this film packs a triple dose of excellence in storytelling, emotion, and performance. Certain moments are explicit, but interesting and necessary nonetheless. Often, such examples contribute to Hal Hartley's more self-conscious stylizations with dialog and camera. Produced for around $1mil, writer-director H.H.'s budgetary restrictions have bred fantastic alternatives to technological chicanery and lavish production overkill. His economy is powerful. Very, having much in common with Danny Boyle's use of Victorian stage tricks in lieu of visual effects in TRAINSPOTTING. HENRY FOOL'S subject matter and narrative pacing are quite different from TRAINSPOTTING, but the film's common success is the postmodern mythification of current day losers. Both serve societal underlings-- in class and lifestyle-- with masterful literary treatment on the screen. Quite possibly, the very best film of the year.
Rating: 
Summary: OFF THE BEATEN PATH
Review: Hal Hartley is a talented and unconventional director... and one whom most Americans have never heard of. Henry Fool is one of Hartley's quirky pictures with an astoundingly strange range of characters. Unfortunately the film's storytelling drags its feet a little bit to the detrimental of the overall quality and watchability of the picture. There are sufficient twists and turns in this film and in the lives of its characters, particularly the title character and Simon, to make it worthwhile and interesting. This is, however, not Hartley's best. Parker Posey is her usual, satisfying self as Simon's sister. The cast is comprised of relative nobodies (people we have seen perhaps but cannot remember their names) and this serves the film well. You don't go into it with any expectations and leave surprised because of some of the hideous and sometimes outrageous and grotesque occurrences. You will just have to see it to believe it. This is a thoroughly quirky and surprising film.
Rating:
Summary: Can You See Beauty in Ugliness! (Lou Reed/Andy Warhol)
Review: Hal Hartley is annoying as a director. Fed on the cotton candy of Hollywood conventional narrative we initially recoil from his parody of the mentor/author relationship. It is overlong, built around a series of anti-climaxes, and is sometimes didactic. Nevertheless, it is engaging. At the center of this engagement lies scenes where serious emotional trauma tangles with the idiotic, surreal or profane. This erupts into a humour as black as anything in Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man", and while it cannot carry the whole film it does help endear it to us. By the end of the two hours plus you are left tested and ehausted, but with an odd sense of catharsis, and cannot help but wonder: 'what was that beauty amongst all that ugliness?'
Rating:
Summary: Comic Epic with Heart, Soul and Bruises
Review: Hartley's Masterpiece: An epic, dark comedy with heart and soul and bruises.
If Hal Hartley were never to make another film, he could easily go down as having created a genuine American Masterpiece with "Henry Fool." Hartley takes this material and stamps it with heart and soul and distance. It's like staring at a palette of beautiful colors - then stepping back to realize it's a bruise. Henry is never less than this astonishing.
As Henry,Thomas Jay Ryan gives what is easily the best film debut I've seen in many years. None of the wimpy whispery-voiced drivel that passes for acting these days (from even some of our best screen actors) his performance practically pops off of the screen like a fart at a funeral. The rest of the cast - James Urbaniak, Parker Posey, Maria Porter, Kevin Corrigan, et al. - are on the same inspired level, but it's obvious why the film is named after Henry. I cannot wait to see this man in more.
Obviously allegorical, "Henry Fool" fairly teems with its laundry list of symbolism both quaint and profound, easy and impossible. I found my cheeks hurting from the smile stretching across my face for much of the film. Other moments had my eyes welling with tears at the beauty - and pain - these oh, so deceptively simple lives toil through.
This is not, obviously, a film for all audiences, there is something of the fairy tale here and while suspension of disbelief is required, it is also its own reward. Actually the characters, though larger than life, are so evenly and wondrously drawn as to become recognizable to all of us as ourselves or others in our own lives. Here we weigh out the seemingly unfair advantages we perceive "others" has having, the pronouncements of self-worth and desire for acceptance and understanding.
Hartley's dialogue is equal to the visual aspects of his film: almost stagey (in the good sense), but with a direct honesty that many, unfortunately, will find offputting. His cast delivers these perfectly placed pronouncements with all the gravitas demanded of the situation - and sound natural doing so. It's a beautiful film to listen to.
Aside from the brilliant storytelling, "Henry" is also beautiful to look at. Hartley's cameramen lens a Queenscape most unusual - one never quite feels he knows where it's taking place, despite obvious "Queens" clues. Every frame - from Henry's powerfully bizarre arrival to the last triumphant (and gloriously ambiguous) cell is a pleasure, a joy to watch.
At its conclusion all I could say was "this was the best movie I've ever seen." Upon reflection, I realize it probably isn't, but at that moment (and each ensuing viewing) I recapture that same, precise feeling. That's what I want in a movie and Henry delivers every time.
Rating:
Summary: for the playa hatas
Review: I agree with this film. All that is in life cannot be learned from a book...--And I believe that the film is _greatly_ strengthened by Mr Hartley choosing not to show a certain something integral to the film. The viewer does the work for Hartley in conjuring a personal mental image/belief/conception of what each respective thing is like. Why should Hartley include such when this artificial image is any case much more powerful than anything Hartley could have explicitly included? It goes with the neg. capability kinda idea in the film, which is how it ends, is he running hither or thither (tho I believe he is running away from the plane.) It would have been cooler if Simon read tattered Keats, but anyway. The characters are depressing and disconnected (and believably so) because people in life are largely depressing and disconnected -- especially the kind of people who write online reviews. There. Now I've colored myself as hypocritical as the kind of snob who obliquely dismisses this film as pseudo intellectual babble, as if it were Dogma. It is not.
Rating:
Summary: for the playa hatas
Review: I agree with this film. All that is in life cannot be learned from a book... --And I believe that the film is _greatly_ strengthened by Mr Hartley choosing not to show a certain something integral to the film. The viewer does the work for Hartley in conjuring a personal mental image/belief/conception of what each respective thing is like. Why should Hartley include such when this artificial image is any case much more powerful than anything Hartley could have explicitly included? It goes with the neg. capability kinda idea in the film, which is how it ends, is he running hither or thither (tho I believe he is running away from the plane.) It would have been cooler if Simon read tattered Keats, but anyway. The characters are depressing and disconnected (and believably so) because people in life are largely depressing and disconnected -- especially the kind of people who write online reviews. There. Now I've colored myself as hypocritical as the kind of snob who obliquely dismisses this film as pseudo intellectual babble, as if it were Dogma. It is not.
Rating:
Summary: Ambiton, talent, art, responsibility, influence and love...
Review: I didn't expect to like this video as much as I did. It has all the elements that I usually don't like in independent films. It moved too slow, it tried too hard to be arty, it used disgusting images, and it took a long long while to get to the point. I was bored occasionally and considered shutting it off, but then something would hook me again and I'd find myself intrigued and fascinated. A shy and geek-like garbage man named Simon Grimm lives with his depressed mother and wild oversexed sister. Then, Henry Fool rents their basement apartment and everyone's life changes. He's loud, egomaniacal, weird, intelligent, has an extraordinary vocabulary and some of his long speeches are almost pure poetry. He has notebooks with him and tells Simon he's been writing a long confession that he won't show anyone but thinks of as a masterpiece. He influences Simon to start writing too. The story is much more complex but involves ambition, talent, art, responsibility, influence and love. All this is brought out with a full cast of wonderful characters. The acting was exceptionally good. The casting excellent. The story was strange but very real. Parts of it skirted on pure genius. And after it was over I was moved and haunted by the questions it raised about life and art.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor...
Review: I disliked this film SO much. It did not have the same feel as past Hartley films; it seemed it lacked soul. I found the character unlikeable and unappealing. If you are expecting Trust, Amateaur, or even Flirt, don't waste your time.
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