An entertaining comedy with dashes of sex, all served up by a top cast
Noise (2008)
Theatrical Release: May 9, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: Henry Bean (“The Believer”) returns to the big screen with a complete rarity in American movies today: a comedy of ideas. David (Oscar-winner Tim Robbins) is a successful lawyer who can’t stand the fact that Manhattan is a place where it’s too noisy to get a good night’s sleep, listen to... Henry Bean (“The Believer”) returns to the big screen with a complete rarity in American movies today: a comedy of ideas. David (Oscar-winner Tim Robbins) is a successful lawyer who can’t stand the fact that Manhattan is a place where it’s too noisy to get a good night’s sleep, listen to classical music, or even make love to his wife without disturbance. Every time David hears a car alarm going off, he swings into action. Adopting the guise of “The Rectifier,” he engages in acts of vandalism that satisfy him immensely but which generate no end of grief from his wife (Bridget Moynahan). They also make him politically controversial when he provokes the ire of the city’s arrogant mayor (Oscar-winner William Hurt). --© ThinkFilm [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Tim Robbins, Bridget Moynahan, William Hurt, Margarita Levieva, Gabrielle Brennan
Reviews
A presumably rectifiable dilemma for urbanites needs more serious treatment.
The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.
I'd hate to live in a movie world that didn't make room for weird, imperfect little movies like this.
A tale of obsession and vigilantism cut with humor and a little Hegel, Henry Bean's Noise is a satisfyingly screwy New York story in which a successful businessman/family man jettisons all because he can't stand the cacophony on the street.
Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy.
It's wickedly amusing for a little bit, but ultimately the film becomes what it's fighting: just noise.
A splendidly eccentric independent film written and directed by Henry Bean.
There’s an intriguing canvas here, but Bean paints in broad strokes and then just sort of gives up at the end.
The moral of this failed fable might best be summed up as, "Dude, get some earplugs."
The movie's real appeal lies in the simple but by no means inconsiderable pleasure of watching Tim Robbins take a hammer to a parked car as it wails pointlessly, deep into the night.
Like the car alarms it demonizes, Noise is insistent and initially attention-grabbing -- but eventually a little one-note and empty.
The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.
If Noise takes a certain New York path and tries to gently negotiate rather than smash things, Robbins and Hurt at least manage to keep it real.
Noise, the second part of a projected 'fanatic trilogy', is shallow and loud.
Noise is meant to be a fable of personal empowerment for Everyman, but due to some wildly uneven direction and one-dimensional characters, it simply comes off as a shallow Yuppie fairy tale.
Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.
[Director] Bean writes interesting scripts that toy with big ideas, but the films that result aren't always good. (Or even bearable.) Here he sets out to make an aural Fight Club, but instead he's made a movie about a guy who really needs to buy earplugs.
Of all the problems in the world today we get a movie about car alarms? Seriously?
The concept had potential, but the movie's broad approach (including a ridiculous turn by William Hurt as a mayor with a laughable dye job) drowns out its message.


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