TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Robert J. Maxwell A man enters a rural town for a humdrum purpose and everywhere he turns he finds mystery. People answer elliptically. No one is friendly. Puzzling things happen. Objects aren't where they're supposed to be. Records are missing. Why, it's almost as if the villagers were -- covering up some secret! When these things are done right, they can be genuinely effective. "Bad Day at Black Rock" is simple but gripping. "The Wicker Man" is unforgettable -- the original, not the loathsome remake. Even a low-budget TV movie like "Evidence of Blood" can do the job. And no one can finish reading Shirley Jackson's story for the first time without a gasp. She offers no real explanation. As someone said of another short story writer, ""Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."The problem is that Jackson's is a short story, and short stories about mysterious and unexplained events can be stellar as long as they remain short. Look at Hemingway's "The Killers" -- nasty, concise, horrifying.But when you turn a short story into a feature-length movie, you have to pad it out, tell the back stories, parse the synecdoches, fill in all the blanks that made the original so enthralling.That's the problem the film makers ran into here. Those back stories and ellipses. "The Lottery" is littered with them. And they're not too interesting either. As the hero, Cortese, is making his escape with Keri Russel towards the end -- long AFTER what SHOULD have been the end -- they have a kind of philosophical exchange in which Russell defends the practices of her small town by counting the vices of the big city that Cortese has come from. It's a stupid brief. It makes as much sense as an argument in favor of the euthanasia of the mentally ill or the unemployed. ("At least we're pruning the herd.") A couple of good character actors appear in this film -- William Daniels, M. Emmet Walsh, Veronica Cartwright. It's beneath their dignity. Salome Gens gives an outstanding performance in her brief appearances.As the puzzled visitor, Dan Cortese is okay. He brings a certain professionalism to the role. He's darkly handsome in a conventional way, and a bit over-muscled. But make up has made a mistake that they didn't make with Keri Russell. Cortese has been given, not an ordinary haircut, but the kind of carefully styled grooming that was popular among West Coast celebrities at the time, a sort of pattern in which the man's hair is swept back into a wavy loaf over his occiput, suggesting the sagittal crest of an extinct reptile. Keri Russell's russet tresses are alternately straight and curled -- and very long. She has the features of a kewpie doll and is quite attractive. How much of an actress she is, is hard to tell from this hollow attempt to make a long film out of a gem of a short story.

sk2005_4 The short story The Lottery (by the late great Ms. Jackson) has three major points that make it gut-wrenching:1.) The fact that a woman is stoned to death 2.) The fact that the woman had participated in stoning people up to the time of her death 3.) The fact that, in the story, this is an accepted American pastimeThis movie (if you can call it that) completely forsakes No. 3, and all but ruins No.'s 1 and 2. After an endless and pointless journey into a small town with a secret, a forgotten past, and a love story (it sounds stupid already), we finally get to the Lottery. The events don't come as a surprise, even though they should. Then the movie wraps itself up into a neat little package complete with an ending as lackluster as a lump of coal. The truly sad thing is that I saw this movie in a Liturature class. Bottom line: They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

tlgerma This classic tale of misguided faith and tradition is done a horrible injustice in this made for TV adaptation. It utilizes little of the original suspense found in the story surrounding the question of "what is the lottery" and does little to further the themes of tradition and faith. Rather, the TV adaptation plods around a pre-story and end with the worst "gotcha" contrivance of an ending possible. I'm sure if Jackson was around today to see this sham of a film, she'd feel as if she'd won the lottery and was being stoned by the script and its direction. What particularly upsets me about this very poor adaptation is that it alters so much of the story as to make it less about the town and much more about a budding romance and a boy from the big city. Perhpas the only redeeming feature of the film is some OK character acting by some rather well-known Hollywood character actors. Other than some good performances (which are buried at times by the lame script), this film lacks the substance of the Jackson piece.

Tresix I first read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" in my high school freshman English class and was really shocked that they would let us read THIS kind of story in a learning institute. Needless to say, that tale has always stuck with me. When I heard that NBC was going to be showing a made-for-TV movie based off of the story, my hopes were not high. When I saw the finished product, my fears were confirmed. Let's face it, folks, there are some short stories that just aren't meant to be feature-length films and this is one of them. I think it would have made a much better short subject or been done as an episode of a horror anthology series in the mold of "The Twilight Zone" or "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". The story's theme of blindly following archaic traditions still rings within the film, just having it being padded out into a conventional thriller didn't work for me though. To see how to handle a short story REALLY well, try to find the adaptation of William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" that starred a young Angelica Huston. In a similar vein as "The Lottery", "Rose" runs approximately fifteen minutes and is very effective and evocative.