A Murder of Crows (1999)

Best movie of this year hands down!

A Disappointing Continuation

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I found this movie to be delightfully original (although a few parts were predictable) and it became more interesting and suspenseful as the plot developed.Its strength was in the acting and originality, and its weakness was in the non-development or quick-development of some of the main characters, Tom Beranger and Carmen Argenziano's specifically.The movie seemed to be rushed near the end, and could have been better developed as the plot thickened.SPOILER: just a couple points. I felt that Cuba Gooding's character should have disguised himself after escaping the first time. And why was Tom Beranger at the house of Mark Pellinger?

Sometimes a film is so well written, that even though you know what's coming, you're still on the edge of your seat. A Murder of Crows is an independent film with some big time star power, that makes a terrific story that much better. The film focuses on Lawson Russell, (Cuba Gooding Jr.) a successful New Orleans defense attorney, who suddenly finds his conscience. A series of events leads to his disbarment, so he begins life a new in Key West. Once there, he meets a lonely old man looking for a friend. The old man insists that Russell read his crowning achievement, a novel. Russell is more than impressed with the book and goes to tell his friend about it when he finds that the old man has died. Russell then suddenly loses his conscience again and decides to pass the book off as his own. Russell's life seems to be back on track until the FBI shows up and arrests him. As it turns out, the murders depicted in the book weren't fiction and Lawson Russell is the prime suspect. From there the film turns into a mystery, who was this old man? Why did he set Lawson up? Who is the real killer? As I said the story is ingenious and very well written, unfortunately, I watch a lot of movies and actually figured the whole thing out, twenty minutes into the film. It wasn't that the film was predictable, most of the other reviews I've read seem to suggest that most people were shocked by the ending. I have no idea why I figured out what was going on so quickly, but this film is so good, that even knowing what was going to happen, I still loved it. Cuba Gooding Jr. was just off the charts good in this movie, he brings such energy and charisma to this role, that it easy rivals his Academy Award winning performance in Jerry McGuire. The rest of the cast is terrific as well, but all the other parts were seemingly bit parts that centered around Lawson Russell. This movie was the perfect fit for Cuba Gooding Jr. and was one of the best written films I've seen all year. A Murder of Crows proves that you don't need a big budget, with huge special effects, in order to make an extremely entertaining film. Gems like this one are rare, but ultimately are the whole reason I watch Independent films.

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.

The director certainly wasn't the reason why I gave this movie a try, because I must say that I've never heard of the man before. Still, that doesn't mean he can't make a good movie of course. Many famous directors once started their careers when their name was still unknown, so why wouldn't this man be able to make an excellent movie? And I'm already used to watch movies that don't seem to appeal to a great audience for different reasons, so in the end I went for it and hoped for the best...After Lawson Russell gets disbarred as a lawyer for not defending one of his clients the way he should - he knows the man is guilty and his conscience forbids him to keep the man out of jail - he will write a book about his experiences. But the work doesn't progress at all, he doesn't even get started. With his publisher on his back, he doesn't really know what to do. And that's when he meets an old man for the first time. They get along well and when the man asks Russell to read the manuscript of a book that he has been writing, Russell is blown away by it. He is completely struck by the genius of the story and wishes he had written it himself. When he wants to return it, he finds out that the man has just died and then he comes up with an idea that will change his life: he will have the book published under his own name and will not tell anybody that he isn't the original author. The book is an instant best-seller, but than all good fortune turns against him. He gets arrested for the true life murders of the five lawyers in his book and has to try to prove that he is innocent, which is almost impossible because he has burned all evidence of what he did...As a story this certainly isn't awful. Although I can't really see it as an original or strong movie, it is enjoyable and entertaining enough to spend 1.5 hours on it. I guess in the end it is Cuba Gooding Jr. who really makes it worth watching. It's nice to finally see him in a leading role and he gets away with it pretty well. But it also has to be said that he can never make you forget about the weak plot twists in the movie. In the end this movie has too many weaknesses and looks too much like the average courtroom thriller, but even though this isn't the best thriller ever, I know worse ways of spending my time. I'm certainly not saying that it is a masterpiece, but in my opinion it still deserves a rating of 6.5/10.