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A Murder of Crows (1999)
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I had high hopes for this one. An interesting premise: Lawyer Lawrence Russell, disbarred by a corrupt judge for throwing the case of a client he knew to be guilty, heads to Key Largo to run a fishing boat and write his novel. The novel never comes to him, and he can't live off his ideals. Happenstance comes in the guise of an old man named Christopher Marlowe, who befriends Russel and shows him his unpublished manuscript, and then kicks off of a heart attack. Russell adopts it as his own, and becomes an overnight literary sensation, with one problem: the book, a murder mystery, contains information about actual murders. Russell soon becomes the one and only suspect in the slayings.
So, yeah. An interesting premise. That and a quarter will buy you a cup of coffee thirty years ago. Hammy acting abounds, from Gooding to Berenger to Laurence to the usualy good Eric Stoltz. Nothing makes any logical sense, no matter how hard writer/director Rowdy Herrington tries to mash square pegs into round holes. Russell is the dumbest lawyer to ever live, having no knowledge of criminal statistics or literature, and several action sequences play out like they were intended to be in a parody film. The end also happens to be the single most absurd turnaround it has ever been my extreme misfortune to sit through.
Herrington made a movie I like a bunch, JACK'S BACK, and seems to have used up all of his skills on that one, and had nothing left over for this piece of sh*t. There is one scene in particular that made me want to die: a character is loading a revolver. The camera is level on the table, with the bullets hard in the foreground and the actor in the background. When he stretches his arm forward to grab a bullet, his hands become Mecha-Godzilla paws all up in the screen, and the pseudo-3D effect gave m a headache. Just an example of a bad filmmaker trying to block shots that are interesting. Except he doesn't remember how to do it, and just annoys the audience.
About the only redeeming factor to this film is that you get to see Ashley Laurence's left breast. After Cuba Gooding, Jr. licks her f*cking face. *shudder*
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