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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
(Reviewed December 5, 2002, by James Dawson)
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Holy cow, what an abysmally awful movie! I honestly picture audiences from coast to coast walking out of this bomb in the proverbial droves. Ticket-buyers will be expecting a goofy lowbrow yuk-fest, considering that it is a fictionalized biography of "The Gong Show" creator/host Chuck Barris. What they will get instead is a bleak, ugly, relentlessly unpleasant, ass-numbingly dull "anti-comedy." Yikes!
Sam Rockwell is charmless, unfunny and therefore woefully miscast in the Barris role. The only time he makes any effort to impersonate Barris is during a few short "Gong Show" hosting scenes. In the rest of the movie, he mainly looks stupefied and shell-shocked.
The cinematography alternates between the color-bleached-and-overexposed to the too-dark-and-dismal, sort of like what you might expect to see in a cheap documentary about eastern-European mental asylums. Even the score of this movie is gratingly unpleasant.
The main thing that makes this bomb so incredibly disappointing is the fact that its screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman, the genius who gave the world "Being John Malkovich," "Human Nature" and "Adaptation." Maybe Spike Jonze, who directed two of those, could have done something with the "Confessions" script to make it absurd, surrealistic, or even merely amusing. But "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"'s first-time director George Clooney (who also has a role) gets everything wrong here. There should have been at least a few laughs in the bizarre premise that Barris was working as a CIA hitman at the same time as he was producing game shows such as "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game," but you won't find them in this dirge.
If my "Worst of 2002" list had 11 slots instead of only 10, this movie would be on it.
Back Row Grade: F
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