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Drowning Mona

Drowning Mona

List Price: $9.95
Your Price: $9.95
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: the nickster from NY
Review: I loved this movie. It has a very offbeat, wonderful comedic flavor. Bette Midler is wonderful and so is everyone else. This film had me laughing the whole time. I have told all of my family and friends to buy this movie. The special features with the DVD are amazing. Behind the scenes footage and commentary are what movie making is all about. BUY THIS MOVIE!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not that Bad, Not that Good.
Review: Not as bad as some people have made it out to be but it's not as good as some people had made it. The whole movie is really one very long joke, that has some very funny parts in it. Most of those parts really belongs to Neve Campbell, who steals this movie with her great performace, and William Fincher, who's performace as Mona's dead beat husban had me rolling in my seat. Other than them, Most of the actors realy don't come off that well, and the movie itself stalls about half way in.

It's a good rental, that's all.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A Misguided Mess
Review: In the early 1990's the Yugo car company decided to test their new cars in a town of Verplanck New York. All the inhabitents drive a Yugo. In the town lives Mona Dearly played by the divine miss M or Bette Midler who everybody hates. But when her car is sabtaged she drives off a cliff. But when the towns local sheriff played by Danny Devito sets to find the killer actually all the people just want to know who to thank for killing her. That is the entire premise of Drowning Mona.

But what a misguided mess. First of all Bette Midler is only seen through flashbacks but no one is actually funny. Director Nick Gomez should have kept a closer eye on things before they got all out of hand. Casey Affleck is accused of killing Mona and his bride to be played by Neve Campbell leaves him. But what director Gomez does right is get some very funny cracks about Yugos and some very funny performances from William Fichtner who plays the cheating mumbuling husbsand who is cheating on a local waitress played by Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Affleck as the would be killer is to innocent to even be considered. But who cares. Drowning Mona is one misguided odd ball movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: WORTH RENTING!
Review: i read all the other reviews and i was truly puzzled--i LIKED this offbeat, quirky black comedy that had witty dialogue, outlandish story twists and an eyecatching variety of camera angles...maybe not a true classic (which is why i gave it 4/5 starts) but definitely worthwhile entertainment! (i thought the yugo and the wheel of fortune running gags pretty darned funny) if you like the offbeat, you should like drowning mona (did you like the movies hairspray? raising arizona? i think this has a similar quirkiness)

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Floundering a little, but definately not drowning
Review: Although this ovie was not great it wasn't bad either. the movie moves sluggishly from the start to the end, and i never really got into it. However the characters in this make it worth a rental. Every person in this town is nuts, in some way or another, alos the majority of them drive modified and origional yugo's. THis makes for a quirky cast of characters who are fun to watch. THe actors do a good job of brining the charcters their own individual personalities. The movie itself, is predictable enough, although there are a few twists, and the jokes are good for a quick laugh. THe disc itself looks good and sounds fine. THe extras aren't spectacular with teh usual bios, and trailers, and dumb deleted scenes. So if you like quirky movies with some quick laughs,give mona a shot, but you might wanna wait for it to become a cheap-o rental.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: This movie sucks.
Review: I figured that with all those big named stars, this movie couldn't be that bad. Boy was i wrong. This was by far one of the stupidest, most wasted space on the video store shelf movie. One or two parts were mildly entertaining but you'd get more laughs from an episode of Friends. Definately a dumb-waste-of-$4- if i ever saw one. Ugh,terrible movie.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One word........FANTASTICK!
Review: I saw this movie last week, I loved it. Bette Midler does a hilarious performance as the title character, Mona Dearly. The rest of the cast is pretty funny too.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Wasted Talent
Review: I watched this movie because the cast included Bette Midler, Danny DeVito and Jamie Lee Curtis. I thought: "This must be really funny." Wrong. This film is full of adolescent, predictable humor held together with the thread of a mystery: Who killed Mona?. By the end of this movie, the hackneyed humor and "obvious" plot twists lead more to the question of ... Who really cares? The one redeeming feature of the movie is that it contains a large collection of Yugos. So, if you want to feel nostalgic about the Yugo, watch this movie; otherwise, do not let the cast fool you -- skip it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Yugo the Only Winner
Review: The story line of this movie is interesting enough, but the writing and the performance of the actors is anything but stellar. The big names chosen for this movie (DeVito, Midler, Curtiss) are not enough to keep "Drowning Mona" from drowning. The only winner in this movie seems to be the Yugo automobile makers who seem to have created a movie-length advertisement. With only a rare exception EVERYONE in town drives a Yugo. Save your money, don't buy this movie. Rent it only if you are planning on running it for background noise--you won't miss anything by not watching it. Just like most Americans missed nothing by passing up that opportunity to purchase a Yugo from the local dealer.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Drown Mona? Drown Them All
Review: Combine miscasting with an anemic screenplay and a lack of imagination and what do you get? You get "Drowning Mona," a lame comedy directed (and I use the term loosely) by Nick Gomez. Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) is the most hated and despised person in town, apparently by everyone including her husband, Phil (William Fichtner), and her son, Jeff (Marcus Thomas). She's mean, vicious, and lacking of even a single redeeming quality. One day her car goes off a cliff into a lake, and she drowns. Was it an accident, or has a crime been committed? It's up to Police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito) to get to the bottom of it all, which shouldn't be too hard to do since this whole movie hits bottom practically from the opening credits. Beside the fact that this film just isn't funny (which does not bode well for a comedy), there isn't a sympathetic character to be found; everyone involved in this is pretty much just as despicable as Mona herself. The title of this movie should have been "Drown Them All." Jamie Lee Curtis (Rona Cale, the white trash waitress with an eye for Phil Dearly) fares better than the rest here, which is something, given the fact that she's at a loss for anyone or anything substantial to play off of. She'd be better off, still, if she could somehow expunge this one from her resume. The usually reliable DeVito walks through his part as if he never really got a handle on his character, or quite figured out just exactly how or where Rash was supposed to fit into this whole mess, aside from merely being a tool with which to move the plot along. And Midler, with a proven track record for comedy, simply takes her Mona too far. For comedy to work, even the most blatant miscreant has to offer at least a hint of humanity, buried deep though it may be (Like Belushi, in "Animal House," or Dangerfield in "Caddyshack"); Mona lacks even a trace. The rest of the cast, which includes Neve Campbell (Ellen Rash), Casey Affleck (Bobby Calzone), Peter Dobson (Feege) and Will Ferrell (Cubby), can rest easy on one account: After this debacle, there's nowhere to go but up. The only real crime associated with "Drowning Mona" is that anyone allowed it to get farther than the screening room in the first place; and it's such a shame to see the talents of Curtis, DeVito and Midler wasted on something as trifling as this.


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