Northfork

Year: 2003

Grade: D

Country: USA

Director: Polish

Review

first off i should admit that i only watched the first 52 minutes (it’s 94 minutes long), but i think i got a good enough picture. it really doesn’t even matter what happened in the last half of the film because the first half was utterly uninteresting. if you take a big steamy, stinky dump and there happens to be a diamond in the middle it doesn’t really matter. the stink and raunch of the dump is sure to keep me from digging so who cares what’s in the middle? that’s just my philosophy of art – it has to be interesting, entertaining (at least mildly), and have depth for it to be worthwhile. not everyone would agree with me, in which case they might want to spend a few hours dissecting this grandiose pile. there were two laughs in 52 minutes and they were so deadpan that i barely snorted. it’s artsy and has a good cast, but never “gets its wings.”
oh jeez i realize that i just wasted my time reviewing this movie when i could have just cut and pasted this review from allmovie.com…it hits the nail on the head…

“Northfork would be a textbook case of style over substance, if there were any substance there at all. While Nick Nolte finds true grace notes as a minister tending to a dying boy, the film is more interested in mining awkward laughs from the stilted dialogues between James Woods, Mark Polish, and the other company men hired to clear out the town’s citizens. A third story involving the dying boy’s hallucinations (or maybe they are real) of afterlife figures could have added a level of philosophical gravity to the proceedings, but only succeed in layering ethereal kookiness on top of the stilted, ridiculous scenes between the men on earth. The entire film is stridently quirky. The monochromatic color scheme is initially striking, but grows repetitious until the look of the film becomes as arch and deadening as the inane dialogue. While a movie should not be expected to answer questions about life and death, any film that wants to discuss these issues needs to pose the questions in an interesting way. The only question Northfork asks of its audience is, “Isn’t this all so deep and hip?” The answer is no. — Perry Seibert”