Noise (2007)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Sorry, this movie sucks

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

when i found this i was in santa cruz, California. i had been laying down around a carport that house a few cars, maybe i should call it a parking garage. it seemed to me that there were multiple couples coming to and from the same vehicle at times. at some point in time while looking inside a video store i saw this and its summary at that time i thought that the synapses was addressing some mysterious hallucination..... which again appealed to my interests during that period...but now, I'm back in Orlando, fl. have mailed films with tim robbins, vincent gallo, and other Hollywood actors, but they are not on the DVD shelf in my parents home where i sent them....

If you took an extended rant by Andy Rooney on the evils of car alarms, mixed it with a late night, dorm room bull session by a bunch of college kids who just had their first philosophy class and blended that with a man's mid-life crisis…you'd end up with something like this film. Except Noise is even worse than you'd imagine that combination could be.This sputtering, ostentatious, anti-social and smug goulash of a movie essentially presents the equivalent of the Unabomber as not just a hero, but a moral exemplar. Chris Owen (Tim Robbins) hates noise. That makes living in New York City, one of the noisiest metropolises on Earth, a bit problematic. But that's where David lives with his wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) and his daughter Chris (Gabrielle Brennan). David doesn't just hate noise. He rages against it as an assault on his personal dignity. He's so consumed with fury that he starts attacking cars whose alarms have gone off without reason and continue blaring without stop. Even after he gets thrown in jail for his vandalism, David still won't stop. He loses his job, but he won't stop. His wife takes his daughter and leaves him. He still won't stop. David becomes an urban vigilante known as "The Rectifier", disabling car alarms all over New York. That draws the absurdly irrational hatred of the city's mayor (William Hurt) and the attention of a young European woman named Ekaterina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva). She's captivated by David's purpose and certainty and tries to direct him away from petty theft to political progress. The mayor tries to stop them and that suddenly morphs the film into a courtroom drama.Just in case I haven't made it perfectly clear yet…Noise is horrible. It is a wildly inconsistent and alienating movie that splices political agitprop, philosophical wankery, juvenile power fantasies and middle aged desperation into one long stream of consciousness that batters against you like waves upon the rocks. This is the sort of movie that thinks a having a few lines of dialog reference Hegel makes it intellectual. It thinks it has to specifically point out the obvious contradiction in its main character because the audience is too stupid to see it themselves. It fantasizes that angry social misfits are exactly the sort of man with whom women want to have a threesome. And it glories in an unreflective, Holden Caulfieldesque sense of superiority over the rest of the world.Tim Robbins shuffles through Noise like a severe manic-depressive whose medication occasionally wears off. William Hurt gives a bizarre performance as a 19th century anarchist's idea of what a politician is like. Bridget Moynahan might as well be a potted plant. Margarita Levieva plays a character so convenient and ephemeral that it would have made more sense for Ekaterina to be a schizophrenic hallucination that only David could see.Noise makes it seem like writer/director Henry Bean suffers from multiple personalities and each took a turn in crafting a different part of this film. Unfortunately, all of his personalities are terminally boring and none of them know what the others are doing. Fantasy and realism, drama and melodrama, comedy and tedium rattle against each other. There's even a point where the movie acknowledges that it's fiction, presenting itself like edgy propaganda meant to provoke a response from the audience. The only response you'll want to make is to throw something at the screen.I can't understand how anyone who read this script gave Bean the money to make this film. I can't imagine how anyone who watches Noise would ever give him any money to ever make another movie. I can only hope he can find himself some other employment so we're not subjected to any more of his work.

Now, if I hadn't had sex with Bridget Moynahan in a month, I really don't think a car alarm would have interrupted me. Having said that I am in complete agreement with David (Tim Robbins). Car alarms, motorcycles, those damn beep beep phones - they should all be dealt with in the most severe manner. David has the guts the rest of us lack.David did give them a chance. The legal system refused to enforce the law, so he justifiably took matters into his own hands. (It's in the Declaration of Independence.) Of course, he did jail time. He was fired, and his wife kicked him out.He eventually joins forces with Ekaterina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva), and they manage to rile the Mayor (William Hurt). But, they do pick up a new partner (María Ballesteros) for their after hours fun.This was a hilarious movie about how we need to take a stand for our neighbors. Really.Oh, yeah, his wife takes him back in the end. Good for her.

I really enjoyed most of this movie. I identify with the main character's (Tim Robbins is delightful and capturing) complete and utter distraction by the car alarms and the horrific head splitting noise that they make. His vigilante antics were funny and inspiring, albeit illegal, but I understand how noise can drive you mad when there is no rest from it. I definitely was rooting for him. The movie stagnated when a menage a trois was thrown in out of nowhere having nothing to do with plot development or understanding the characters better. It didn't add anything to the movie. Instead it took away from the continuity and left me wondering what the point of it was. It seemed like it was from another movie altogether as filler for time purposes. Once that was over and the movie plot resumed, it had a satisfying ending.