Best movie of this year hands down!

Really Surprised!

Overrated

best movie i've ever seen.

On paper this looks like a good idea - a film about the pioneer pornographic film-making brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell, starring film-star brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. There might well have been a great film made out of the story, but the finished product simply lacks a governing intelligence with anything dramatically exciting or insightful to say about the tale.Estevez directs from a script to which three writers are credited. The piece takes a very formulaic television bio-movie approach to its subject matter. We begin at the end, with Artie threatening to kill Jim, then zap back to their boyhood and then forwards in chronological order through their establishing themselves in the adult movie business, battling for their 5th amendment right to make and exhibit their films, hit big time with the feature Behind the Green Door, stand up to the mob, get over-ambitious in their film-making and fall to pieces through drinks, drugs and broken relationships. Jim manages to pull himself together but Artie goes off the rails, and ironically Jim ends up shooting his errant brother dead.There's an attempt to show that the brothers learned the value of sorting out problems with a gun early on, although this is never linked to the wider gun culture in American (an approach which might have been intriguing). The final scenes are emotionally affecting but too much of the film plods by and left this viewer with a feeling that both the milieu had been better portrayed and the techniques better utilized elsewhere. The film lacks the epic feel of a descent into the pit which makes Boogie Nights so powerful; the flashy cutting, integration of music and showy set pieces all feel a bit second-hand - Scorsese, MTV, even Spielberg circa Jaws are referenced but apart from an impressive tracking shot following one of the wives from one brother in the swimming pool to another sniffing coke upstairs, nothing ever flies out of the screen - it remains steadfastly movie-of-the-week stuff.The problem is perhaps ultimately in the subject matter: porn films have such a visceral effect with their meat shots and money shots that unless we are actually going to go there and see those things, it is very difficult to convey the intensity of the environment in a non-porn drama. Boogie Nights managed it through the quality and originality of the writing, acting and film-making; everything in Rated X is perfectly respectable (perhaps that is part of the issue?), but nothing really powerful or astonishing occurs. Nothing more is to be gained from the film than reading the short wikipedia entry on the Mitchell Brothers, and imagining better films like Boogie Nights and The People Vs Larry Flint.

Emilio Estavez directed this, but one wonders why. It doesn't take a genius to realize that a movie about two porn movie directors is not going to win any Academy Awards. What was Emilio thinking? You can play it as tragedy. You certainly can't make heroes of these guys. I guess what he was thinking was this was a part of America from the sixties to the nineties in the twentieth century--this was the reality and let's tell the truth. but somebody else might say, why bother? Most critics and viewers would call this a prize turkey, but...but is there some redeeming social value? Charlie Sheen and Estavez star as the brothers Mitchell, two entrepreneurial guys who stumble from the free love scene of the sixties in San Francisco to the cash cow of the first widely distributed porn movies, including the infamous "Behind the Green Door." Maybe there is a kind of free speech angle here, with the porno boys fighting the good fight against censorship and Big Brother. On the other hand, there is a didactic tale here about how success corrupts and how sex, drugs and rock and roll--forget the rock and roll; this is almost pure sex and drugs--how sex and drugs may lead you to make a movie called "Sodom and Gomorrah" which may suggest that you ought to be starring it in.Charlie Sheen is very good and so is Estavez. His direction is also not bad. The movie moves right along and the degeneration of the brothers is well expressed. Megan Ward had a chance in a supporting role here, but she failed miserably, possibly because how could she feel any connection with a role that made her the quasi-tolerant, quasi-suffering wife of a man who makes his living pandering to lust (and indulging his own) while smoking, drinking and snorting anything he can get his hands on? Not pretty. However, I wouldn't be surprised if someday in the distant future, long after I am gone, that in some social science class at say Cal Berkeley this movie is played as augmenting an anthropological study of a certain segment of our population in the later part of the 20th century. The students can see this as a film documenting the moral corruption of a nation following Vietnam and the Nixon administration, perhaps even anticipating the moral corruption we see today.But I would advise you to skip this unless you are a big Emilio Estavez fan, in which case this is a must see, or if you are a Charlie Sheen fan, and then it is worth seeing because this is one of his better performances, and you've got to see these guys in their bald domes and their side burns and authentic seventies attire. To be honest, I've seen people win Academy Awards who weren't half as good as Sheen was. Naturally this won nothing.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

The Mitchell brother's story is made for the movies. It has everything that would make a intriguing film: sibling rivalry, rags to riches story, excess, madness, skin etc, etc. So what went wrong? Take two brothers who shouldn't be in this business to begin with, The Sheens. Emilio Estevez tries to do a P.T Anderson and fails miserably. We know that the Sheens' acting abilities are feeble, but putting one of them behind the camera and both of them in front just screams out disaster. In addition it doesn't help that Meredith's screenplay is well below par. But just take one look at the writer's other work and you'll get the notion. As mentioned this story had all the potential in the world to become a great film, but put someone with a name and no talent behind it and the result is hideous. Do yourself a favor and don't watch this movie.

Despite the real interesting story which I advice to read from the book (this movie doesn't make a good portrait of it) the direction of the film was horrible. Was necessary to move around the camera so much? Like the worst MTV video. Just because there wasn't much of happening the director thought that is the way to entertain an audience. Don't think so. Often the movie was incredible boring. The acting, specially regarding Sheen, was terrible. I don't reccomend this movie. Choose instead "Boogie Night", which has a very good professional direction and better, much better acting. I wonder if someone could get a compensation for have bought the film on DVD (that's me!)