steve d
Nothing you haven't seen 100 times but fun.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
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Audience Member
Shout is a decent watch starring John Travolta as a music teacher tutoring young rebellious students. The cinematography is decent and the acting is alright. Heather Graham much before being successful plays one of the leads. You can watch it if you are interested in early 90s musicals or are a fan of john Travolta and have vowed to watch every film of his.(strictly for Travolta fans only).
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
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Audience Member
Wake up!
A group of boardinghouse boys see little future or direction in their future in their military like atmosphere. The children just have no feelings of hope; until one day, a man walks into the school and convinces the militant boardinghouse father figure to let him teach the boys music. The man changes the boy's lives forever; and when their teacher gets in trouble, they do their best to inspire him like he inspired them.
"Do you ever let other people touch it?"
"You mean my guitar?"
"What else would I be talking about?"
Jeffrey Hornaday, director of Teen Beach Movie, Geek Charming and the upcoming Teen Beach Movie 2, delivers Shout. The storyline for this is just an average coming of age movie and love story. The plot is really just okay and not overly compelling. The cast does deliver entertaining performances and includes John Travolta, Heather Graham, Michael Bacall, Gwenyth Paltrow, Sam Hennings, and Richard Jordan.
"Pork chops for dinner!"
I came across this movie on HBOGO and had never heard of it so I decided to give it a shot. This wasn't bad but it wasn't as good as similar movies in this genre like Sandlot, Goonies, and Stand by Me. This is worth a viewing and fairly good, but is far from elite or worth adding to your DVD collection.
"A strong hand is what they need. Discipline."
Grade: C
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
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Audience Member
Shout (Jeffrey Hornaday, 1991)
It should say something about my reaction to this film that what I find most amusing about it is that a guy named Hornaday directed a movie about a music teacher and his charges. And that is the best thing about this otherwise generic, Lifetime Original Movie-bait inspirational romance claptrap, one of the movies John Travolta made during the long lull in his career between Blow Out and Pulp Fiction, presumably because he needed the money. It could have, should have, been Travolta's return to the musical-comedy roots that had made him a household name almost fifteen years previously, except, well, pity about the script. The only reason this movie is still remembered, and still available, is that it was the film debut of a young actress by the name of Gwyneth Paltrow.
The film, set in Texas in 1955, concerns the youths who inhabit a boys' home, technically an orphanage but run more like a reform school, with the sadistic Eugene Benedict (Logan's Run's Richard Jordan) at its head. The boys' home has a new charge, a dissolute rabble-rouser named Jesse Tucker (The Heights' Jamie Walters; he may be best-remembered as the lead vocalist on the show's theme song, "How Do You Talk to an Angel?", a top 40 hit in 1992) who seems destined for life in prison. Adding to the chaos are two events that happen simultaneously-Benedict's daughter Sara (From Hell's Heather Graham) comes home from college for summer break, and Benedict hires a new music teacher, Jack Cabe (Travolta), to whip the school band into shape for their annual performance at the town's Fourth of July shindig. The two kids, obviously, take a shine to one another immediately, though in true genre-romance-novel form, there must be many mishaps on the road to jumping between the sheets, while Cabe finds himself attracted to the sexy sister (The Last Seduction's Linda Fiorentino) of one of the local redneck constabulary. Which is doubly troubling, because Cabe is a fan of that new-fangled bop stuff that really doesn't play well in racist Texas-unless, it seems, you are an inmate in a boys' home, because once the kids hear it playing from his room at night, they beg him to drop Benedict's curriculum and teach them that stuff.
Ah, the inspiration, it bleeds. In hindsight, there are some really interesting choices here. Linda Fiorentino, especially, before getting typecast in her post-Last Seduction hard-bitch roles, is a breath of fresh air. (Paltrow, by the way, has a minor role as a girls'-school love interest for one of the other boys' home inmates.) Unfortunately, the principals are all phoning it in, especially Walters; he's trying to do his best James Dean, and here, at least, he's too young to realize that "often imitated, never duplicated" isn't a crock. There are certainly flashes of Grease-era Travolta, especially in one early scene when he breaks into an improvised song while good-naturedly taunting Jesse, who's working off punishment for one of his many infractions by digging a ditch. That scene, that single scene, gave me some hope that this movie might decide to drop the predictability, the inspirational nonsense, blah blah blah, and turn this into a good old musical fantasy romp Xanadu style. Hopes that, unfortunately, were dashed with every minute of film that unspooled after that. **
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
Footloose, drained of everything that made it enjoyable except some of the music. I stopped caring by about the 15 minute mark.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/26/23
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Audience Member
Few people in Hollywood has had more second chances than John Travolta. The surprise box office success of "Look Who's Talking" brought his career back from the dead for one of those second chances, only for the actor to falter again with "Shout a few years later.
This is a limp, uninspired musical drama that is filled with more cliches than you've got fingers, but it's so doggoned earnest that it's not even any fun. We've all seen this movie before, with the bad boy with a heart of gold, the strict adult and his beautiful but willful daughter and the mentor with the shady past who reaches his charges with his unorthodox teaching methods. He's so unorthodox that he teaches a kid to play the piano without sheet music by getting him to cluck like a chicken.
It even throws in the line, "You aren't from around here", and it does so without a touch of irony. You'll be laughing at the picture and not with it because this is all taken so seriously. The music is good, more blues than actual rock and roll, but it's not good enough to energize this lifeless story.
The casting is bland as well. Travolta stands out, but only because everyone else is so boring. The conclusion is predictable, as the student's forgo the stuffy music they've been rehearsing to honor their teacher with an impromptu rock concert, and the audience is left to wonder how the crows came up with their flashy dance moves when the music is allegedly new and foreign to them. "Shout" isn't concerned with such technicalities, and it has nothing new to offer anyone.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
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