City of Angels

Bomb Rating: 

This movie . . . couldn't be more thematically obvious if its charactersjumped off the screen and poured saccharin in our popcorn.

There is a desperate, pathetic need among most of us humans to have life and death make sense. Those of us who can't comprehend chaos and uncertainty, or just won't accept it, usually turn to religion to protect us from unpredictability. We imagine a heaven where eternity consists of reading poetry, sitting in comfy chairs and sipping tea (in between screwing like hounds) -- and imagine an Earth like the one portrayed in "City of Angels."

On that fictional, storybook Earth, angels walk around like refugees from a ZZ Top video, hauling the dead and dying up to heaven and keeping watch over the living. During one such watch, an angel named Seth (Nicolas Cage) falls in love with a doctor named Maggie (Meg Ryan) and must choose between eternity and a human existence.

Having directed "Casper," it's no wonder that Brad Silberling has now made "Seth, the Friendly Ghost." He'll one day make a remarkable used car salesman if he doesn't take up directing soft drink commercials first. With the success of television shows like "Touched by an Angel," America is so wet for this movie it makes me want to gag. If simplicity is a penis, America is the skanky prostitute spreading her legs again and again.

As a doctor and a woman, Maggie desperately needs two things: religion and a man who can express his feelings. When she's depressed, where does she go? She goes to the nursery. Maggie also needs a baby. In other words, Maggie would be a lot better off barefoot and pregnant. Life, I tell you, is difficult and complex, unlike this movie, which couldn't be more thematically obvious if its characters jumped off the screen and poured saccharin in our popcorn.

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