smatysia
There seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments for this film. I thought it was pretty decent. Yes, voice-over narration is often a crutch, but it did not annoy me here. Cuba Gooding played it well even though his character was a little bit too good at evading the police. Tom Berenger was also just fine as a New Orleans police detective. Marianne Jean-Baptiste played all of the right notes as well. I guess I don't spend much time while watching movies trying to guess what is coming, or foretelling the ending. It seems that many people do. To each his own, I suppose. Nice scenery in both New Orleans and Key West. This never seems to have made it into theaters, but it is a nice diversion.
Robert J. Maxwell
Narration in movies can be tricky. Sometimes they're practically a requirement, especially if the plot is convoluted or the prose style ornate, as in Raymond Chandler's work. How could we survive without Philip Marlowe's voice-over telling us that "her hair was the color of gold in old paintings"? Just as often, narrations are a crutch, as they are here, telling us things that an Old Master like Hitchcock would have used imagination and skill to tell us visually. Not only is this narrative sometimes pointless but it varies in tone, as if coming from different characters instead of just Cuba Gooding Jr.'s fugitive lawyer. "There's an old saying: Money talks. The only thing it ever said to me was good-bye." Not bad. (Echoes of Philip Marlowe there.) But then again it sounds sometimes pompous. "Quite simply, the book was perfect." No kidding? What happens in this murder mystery, quite simply put, is that Cuba Gooding Jr. is a disbarred lawyer who is framed for multiple killings of other lawyers. He's pretty bitter about his disbarment, after all. And he IS guilty of something. He comes into possession of a smashing murder novel written by a recent acquaintance, a wheezing old man with no family. When he's told that the old fellow has died of a heart attack, Gooding quite simply appropriates the manuscript, copies it, adds his name as author, and destroys the original. That's known as "plagiarism." The novel turns out to be an exact description of five genuine murders, right down to details that only the police and the killer himself could have known. The story, and Gooding's suppose authorship, attracts police attention. The pursuit is on.Well, Gooding's narrative may sometimes become a little precious but at bottom, quite simply put, he's pretty dumb, even for an attorney. The decrepit old man, who looks suspiciously made-up from the beginning, calls himself Christopher Marlowe. Gooding doesn't even blink, and I suppose there are people named Christopher Marlowe wandering innocently around, even if they aren't Shakespeare's contemporaries. But when a lone detective tells him about the dilapidated dude's death and calls himself Goethe, maybe a red flag should have gone up.The location shooting, around New Orleans, is nice but judging from this film it's inhabited largely by people who can't act well. Tom Berenger has a relatively small role as a real detective and does as well as he can with it. Eric Stoltz, never a human dynamo, probably gives the best performance in the movie as a decadent Southern aristocrat. Gooding himself, who was fine in "Jerry McGuire" is an embarrassment here. His most notable achievement is sprinting down a New Orleans street with two cop cars in pursuit. No one else distinguishes himself or herself, though Marianne Jean-Baptiste carries her weight as a friendly and principled lawyer, and Mark Pellegrino is creepy enough to pass as a professor, never mind a serial killer. He has a face that resonates with Crispin Glover's, for what it's worth, and it's probably worth a lot to an informed movie freak.The direction, quite simply, can be described as "pedestrian." We see a scene of passion on the staircase. A man sweeps a half-naked woman up in his arms and carries her up to her room. How many times have you seen a dissolve into the camera following a trail of discarded garments slowly up to the woman's bed? Don't fib, now. But, actually, there's a surprise at the end of this shot -- because there is nobody in the bed! A cut gives us a distant shot of the standard movie kind of human coupling: they're both naked, he has her pinned against the wall, and her legs are around his hips. I'm not sure anyone really DOES something as uncomfortable as that but it's become a movie convention, like the thumbs up/ thumbs down gesture in Roman amphitheaters, which the Romans never did.Well, why go on? The sad thing is that it's kind of a neat idea -- framing a despised lawyer this way, even if you do drag in Faust. Simply put, though, it's too bad it wasn't better done.
sol1218
***SPOILERS*** "A Murder of Crows" starts off interesting enough with New Orleans defense attorney Lawson Russell sitting in his home and just about to be assassinated by this guy dressed in a Devil costume on Fat Tuesday evening. Russell is told to get of the case he's presiding on that involves New Orleans defending blue-blood Truman Parks III. The mask man is told by Russell that if he refuses to defend Parks he can kiss his career in law good-by; this seemed to have caused the killer to change his mind in doing in Russell.Never the less Russell purposely tries to lose the case for his client Parks and is then disbarred from practicing law for life. Lawson Russell then goes to live in his late fathers home in Key West to start a new career as a writer and part time tourist guide. It's there that he meets this old eccentric Christopher Marlow who after having a ride with him on his boat gives his this manuscript "A Murder of Crows" to read and tell him later what he thinks of it. It must have been a very good story since Russell read in overnight and when he came back to Marlow's hotel room he finds out that he died the night before. Deciding to have the book "A Murder of Crows" published under his name it soon becomes an overnight best seller and Russell is all over the press as one of the most talented young writers in America. But the book is more then just a good novel what it's about, the murder of five prominent defense attorneys, is true and true enough for the police to suspect that Russell murdered them! In the fact that he knows things about the murders that only the killer who murdered them and the police who investigated the case knew.Cuba Goding Jr. as fugitive Lawson Russell was like a bouncing ball on the screen bouncing from New Orleans to Key West and back with the police in both those cities, and all points in-between, not being able to catch him. He seemed to be invisible where almost no one recognized him! Which is very improbable with him being wanted for five murders and having his picture in all the papers and on the TV news and also being the author of the biggest best seller in the country! Looking for the elusive Christopler Marlow Russell comes across a phone connection in New Orleans that somehow puts him, Marlow, there and in Key West Russell soon finds out that the man was a fraud and never existed! And that he, and his cohorts, somehow set up and framed Russell for the murders that Marlow wrote in his book. It would have been so easy for Russell to prove his innocence by proving that he wasn't in the places, that were all across the southern US, where the murders in the book "A Murder of Crows" were committed. Also how did Marlow know that Russell would later have burnt the manuscript, that would have proved Russell's innocence, that he gave him and later had it publish under his name implicating him in the murders? Tom Berenger as New Orleans Det. Clifford DuBose did his best to be over-the-top in his actions as a gong-ho type who liked to do things "His Way". So much so that he kept the FBI out of the loop and almost caused the case of the "dead defense attorneys" to go cold. And thus have the killer get away due to his selfish and unprofessional actions.The ending was just too much to take taking away any believability at all that the movie had left up until then with Russell ending up just like the clients of the five defense lawyers did in the book "A Murder of Crows" as well as Truman Parks III in real life.
