Michaela Palin Oh, dear. Where do I start. I was ready to be entertained. One would have the reasonable expectation that when a movie has a fine cast, there would be some measure of entertainment to be had. Unfortunately, I was mistaken.I found I Heart Huckabees to be utterly dry and dull, and completely and utterly tedious. Incredibly unfunny. The dialogue was the opposite of witty or clever. There wasn't an interesting line in the movie. Poorly scripted. Incredibly unstimulating. I found it to be quite a badly made movie. I was very determined to see it through to the end in order to see if this dodgy movie redeemed itself in any way whatsoever. No, it didn't. What a dreadful balls-up of a film. There are bad movies, and then there are BAD movies. Some bad movies are so bad that they're actually good, such the Nicolas Cage version of The Wicker Man. That movie is so bad that it's hilarious. I Heart Huckabees is NOT like that. I Heart Huckabees is just plain bad. It should never have been made. One of the worst movies I've sat through in my life. The experience of watching it verged on painful. I'm going to donate the DVD to the charity shop. Or perhaps just throw it away so that I won't be responsible for making someone else watch that awful movie.

Christopher Maynard It had been ten years since I'd seen Huckabees and while the film hasn't changed my reaction to it certainly has. When I first saw the film I loved it. I loved how the message of the film was fairly simple but all the distracting double speak and psycho-babble made the film feel aloof and unapproachable. I was in my mid-twenties and I guess I was attracted to aloof and unapproachable. Now those same qualities in this particular context are somewhat annoying and feel pretentious for the sake of being pretentious. Not that this is bad movie by any stretch of the imagination but rather a movie made for a younger man by a younger man.Albert (Schwartzman) is having an existential crisis and hires a pair of existential detectives (Hoffman and Tomlin) to solve a coincidence. The detectives decide to pair up Albert with his "other" Tommy (Whalberg), to help him with his case. Tommy is a militant environmentalist/firefighter who plays a perfect contrast to Albert.The film has moments that are laugh out loud funny to why the hell would they do that disturbing. Most of the humor comes from how painful unaware the characters are of how they sound or appear and Mark Whalberg is especially gifted at saying imbecilic statements with pure conviction. I had forgotten how great he was in this movie. Most of the performances have a bit of a wink to them but not Whalberg, he plays the role completely straight and in turn steals scene after scene.The film tells us that it is about nothingness vs meaning and the struggle between the two. Is everything connected and meaningful or is existence just chaos with no connections or meaning? This can be a frustrating subject to turn around in your mind while you explore your own existence and watching a film maker struggle with the same questions is twice as frustrating.The moments of levity make the film easy to watch but the subject matter and tone didn't quite match up for me. With that being said I admire O Russell for making this film. It took guts to make such a unique film. While the film didn't hold up the way I expected I'm certainly glad it exists. I'm glad that I live in a world where thoughtful 20 somethings can discover this film and start to ask themselves the important questions. www.followingfilms.com

kosmasp This right here is a very weird movie. And "Three Kings" (previous movie by the same director) does not prepare you for what you're about to see. A movie that tries to handle our being/existing in this world and especially tries to creep into a mind of someone who tries to uncover the "meaning" of .. well everything.Does it succeed? It does succeed in being weird and awkward that is for sure. It has the right actors to give it that special vibe too. Dustin Hoffman could sell you that sheet (and the idea of all being one and the same more or less), even Mark Wahlberg (also seen in Three Kings) can handle the craziness with ease. It's Schwartzmanns movie though and he runs with the wild ideas of the script. Will this movie give you answers to possible questions you had? No. Will it be able to entertain you? Depends on your mood and expectations

chaos-rampant It is amazing how much storytelling noise we have in our heads ,just close your eyes and see how many useless thoughts you have in a minute. And it's amazing that films which are about this activity of the mind, and how it obscures the world, and creates illusory images, Buddhist- inspired films from The Matrix and Cloud Atlas, to Cosmopolis, to now this, are always so bent to talk and talk and clutter us more.So I was recently impressed by Silver Linings Playbook; eager for more, I asked around and was pointed to this as more intelligent, more personal work of this guy. It probably is both. So, you have a protagonist in existential crisis who is told about infinity and the inter-connectedness of being, taught the retreat to the cocoon of self where images come to being. And you have the effort to fathom this come alive in layers as broken narrative that we watch.It's essentially the same character splintered in three (Schwartzman, Wahlberg, Jude Law) so that each one runs into some conundrum that comprises part of a broader view. But it all come back to a self that clings to things and can't let go; in his poems that have to be on pamphlets and who gets to lead, in corporate success, in having to save the environment, and so forth. We are all egotistic in this way, clinging to the things we send out, wanting to be important.You have despair and disbelief at the happy spirituality of 'safe places', and the flipside in French deconstructionism, in seductively dark Isabelle Huppert and muddy, animal sex. The childhood trauma. And the middle path that reconciles purity with stained life. All that is fine. Some notion of this or other will be at the heart of most good films. Not to take anything from Russell, he has crafted something that is attractive on the surface, witty if not intelligent. And I appreciate the earnestness of putting it all out there as a search for meaning in modern life. But if your film is to have any actual power, you have to forget all you know as mere thought when you make it, forget the idea and embody the insight. Because none of it is really embodied here, and it gets progressively worse as it goes on until the cloying finale, which I also found in Playbook. Russell in other words explains how it's done, but can't do it in the film so we end up with schematic lessons on self-awareness robbed of their real power.You will know it is schematic, if you look at what is visualized of the protagonist's consciousness inside that consciousness, where images bubble up in the first place, when story-layers have been peeled and films are usually at their most pure. In that level of internal mind you have what? The schematic cartoon with the tree and floating heads. Constructed cuteness.