CHICAGO - MOVIE REVIEWS: SILENT HILL

Silent Hill , based on the popular video game, was not supposed to have been shown to film critics. Apparently the word never got out to whoever showed it to Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert rated it with a single star followed by a question mark. Here is the opening paragraph of his review: "I had a nice conversation with seven or eight people coming down on the escalator after we all saw Silent Hill. They wanted me to explain it to them. I said I didn't have a clue. They said, 'You're supposed to be a movie critic, aren't you?' I said, 'Supposed to be. But we work mostly with movies.' 'Yeah,' said the girl in the Harley t-shirt. 'I guess this was like a video game that you like had to play in order to like understand the movie.' I guess." The word apparently never got out to Canada, either, allowing Peter Howell in the Toronto Star to remark after seeing it that it was "dumber than a bag of coffin nails. ... It doesn't make a lick of sense."

21/04/2006