Another THE POSTMAN test screening review!!!

Welllll, looky looky, Solstice 23 chimed in with his/her/it's review of THE POSTMAN. And He/Her/It liked The Postman... a little better than Norm Peterson's review Though he did think the film deserved a "Kraft" tag. Read on, but be warned, this review has a couple of spoilers, but is a damn good read, IMHO.

Kon Ban wa!

Solstice 23 here, reporting back from my first assignment, a test screening of THE POSTMAN, directed by and starring Kevin Costner. I must say that, after hearing so much about those water-bottle-wielding goblins from the NRG, I was expecting more of a fight. I brought along my standard arsenal of probability-wave disrupters, brownian motion generators, and Schroedinger transducers, just to be sure. My friend Musashi elected to bring his more traditional tools of persuasion. But everyone was perfectly well-mannered. They didn’t even try to take Musashi-san’s kitana. That’s good -- Musashi-san just HATES it when people try to take his kitana!

Before the film, someone explained that while the film isn’t yet finished, all of the footage is pretty much there. Indeed, there was much obvious editing and color-correction that needed to be done, and at 3 hours and fifteen minutes, a good hour’s worth of celluloid that wouldn’t be missed if it saw the cutting room floor.

Anyhow, the plot of THE POSTMAN goes something like this: in the early to mid-21st century, a fuzzy Kevin Costner is a nameless drifter, the survivor of various civil wars and ecological catastrophes. Government is gone, the phone lines are gone; people have retreated to small, isolated settlements. At the film’s beginning, he wanders around the desert, scrounging through deserted gas stations like Mad Max, and putting on awful children’s Shakespeare performances in exchange for food. Rather unlike Mad Max.

Soon enough, he gets captured by an evildoing army called “The Wholeness”, led by the bizarre General Bethlehem (Will Patton). They try to turn him into one of their own. Costner declines, making an improbable escape -- something involving an African lion and leaping 300 feet into shallow waters -- and ends up wandering around cold and starving. Stealing the uniform and mailbag off the skeleton of an ex-Postal Employee, he makes an embarrassing attempt to get some food by delivering the mail, 15 years late, to a small, barricaded villages. It works, and soon everyone is getting all mushy and patriotic about the return of the postal service. The Wholeness don’t take too kindly to all this happiness, however, and general chaos soon ensues.

While there are many conflicting aspects of this movie, Musashi-san and I walked away from it with a single word in mind: CHEESE. And we’re not talking fine Greek Feta, neither. We’re talking Kraft “The Cheesiest” Macaroni and Cheese, boiled in great big vats of Velveeta, topped with dollops of Cheeze Whiz, sprinkled with imitation Parme-- Oh you get the picture. Should this movie ever make it overseas, I fully expect the French government to complain about trade violations -- THAT’S how much cheese this movie contains.

With the time that it runs, it contains a lot more than cheese, however. There’s some surprisingly bloody battle scenes, and one rather steamy romantic encounter with the ubiquitous Love Interest. (Olivia Williams, in her first feature film, is a total babe. If you’re a testosterone-laden guy like me, this movie is worth watching just for her. But didn’t anyone ever tell Kevin Costner that he JUST CAN’T MAKE BABIES WHEN HE’S WEARING THAT MANY CLOTHES!?! Shades of Excalibur! Not that I miss seeing Costner’s naked bod, when Olivia’s is gracing the screen. The literature said that they’re expecting to receive a PG-13 rating -- this would mean they’d have to cut a LOT of that part. Personally, I hope they don’t, ‘cause *I* thought it was one of the most fun parts of the movie.)

What else is there, besides sex, violence, and cheese? Well, there’s lots of sentimental slow-mo shots of people delivering the mail, singing patriotic songs, waving goodbye, and getting blown up. Many people in leather and burlap. Much pontificating about how really groovy it is to receive a letter (“You’ve made us remember what we’d all forgotten!” says Olivia. “You came with the mail, but you delivered HOPE!”) Some of the corniness is almost too much to take. When the Postman walked away from his first mail drop, to the strains of a young girl singing “America the Beautiful,” I damn near died.

There’s also plenty of ill-fitting slapstick, amidst the fairly copious machine-gun fire. Many guttings and throat-cuttings and firing-line executions. Some of these are actually fairly well done, but other times I felt like the movie was pulling it’s punches. And then there’s the blatant Civil-War-Epic-Style battle scenes, complete with a massive Calvary charge through a cornfield (which culminated in a silly little scene which made me think “Aha! So THIS is the exact point where they reached the last of their budget!”) Picture Kevin Costner as general Grant, leading a headlong rush against rabid Confederates whilst thinking “what the bloody hell am I doing wearing this POSTAL uniform!?!?!” Yeah, you’re getting it now.

So are there any good parts to this film? Plenty, actually. For one, the scenery and sets are pretty amazing, and the cinematography often makes quite good -- if overly dramatic -- use of them. And I should further reiterate the lovely qualities of Olivia Williams! (She can act, too!) Some of the dark humor works pretty well, and Tom Petty has an amusing little part as the mayor of a town built into a hydro dam. Even the massively sappy sections elicited an audience reaction, although it was in the form of (obviously unintended) pained laughter.

At the movie’s end, the audience gave it a good round of applause, followed by further gales of laughter and shouts of

“Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!”

P.S.: One more things: there are certain movies which should NOT make allusions to Shakespeare. This is one of them. I’m not about to forgive THAT anytime soon!