House of D (2005)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

good back-story, and good acting

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I suspect a lot of these reviews are fabricated. Williams went full retard, there's a wise and soul-singin' black lady prisoner handing wisdom out the window and the sad parts are sooo forced (crying while plucking cigarettes out of the toilet?). Don't waste your time with this movie.

David Duchovny plays in his debut direction Tom Warshaw, who starts reminiscing his childhood.Now he is an American artist living in Paris, in 1973 he was a 13-year old kid living in Greenwich Village, New York.Tommy (Anton Yelchin) lives with his troubled mother (Téa Leoni) and delivers meat with his best friend, the mildly retarded school janitor Pappas, played by Robin Williams.Tommy gets his best, or worst advice from an inmate he calls Lady (Erykah Badu).Tommy also starts liking a girl called Melissa (Robin's daughter Zelda Williams).The X-Files guy David Duchovny is also the writer of House of D (2004).With this movie he proves to the world he can move beyond Fox Mulder and The X-Files.The casting is perfect.Anton Yelchin is a true find for the role of young Tommy.He may be a bigger star in the future.Also the young Zelda Williams has talents.In Robin Williams's character tragedy and comedy are very well mixed.Mark Margolis does the part of his father.Ms.Badu is known as a singer who can also act.Frank Langella does the part of Reverand Duncan very well.This movie is a very fine nostalgia piece.As a movie it has that originality you would like to see in more movies today.I certainly recommend House of D.

Rule: No Robin Williams film is bad. Now we can begin talking about "House of D", the film written and directed by David Duchovny about a man reviving his past so he can find himself. This is Tommy, in the skin of Duchovny as an older man and in that of Anton Yelchin as a young boy. The plot line the director has created is not what we could call original; it's what we know as refreshing.In one of New York's many neighborhoods Tommy spends time with his best friend Pappas (Robin Williams), a retarded man who works as a janitor in Tommy's school. "Pap-ass", Tommy calls him, and of course the man calls the boy "Tom-ass". They both deliver food and play baseball with the kids of the different schools.In his first full-length script, Duchovny experiments with adolescent love and friendship in his own way, as he puts the main characters through a test. What the actor writes and directs seems to be very personal, very urgent for some reason. The film looks like if it was done in a hurry; the cinematography is too simple, the edition is too forced.Going back to the script, there are lots of things the viewer could ask Duchovny, like the speech from the beginning of the movie, which is pretty weird; like the title reference, which we understand, but we don't see it as crucial to the story as it is supposed to be for Yelchin's character. The story itself has something out of place; like if it had no reason of being (you'll see what I mean). The figure of the mother, played passionately by Tea Leoni, doesn't seem to fit completely.But the movie is watch able and moving at times and there are other things we find inspiring between the silly moments of the screenplay. What is silly sometimes becomes incredibly funny; mostly the material Robin Williams has to deal with, which lies in a fine line between comedy and drama. I may sound stupid but he actually looks like a retarded individual and he shines eventually throughout the film and we are as grateful as ever.Erykah Badu has one of the most powerful characters I've seen in a long time and her performance is equally powerful. And Alton Yelchin is one in a million. His voice is so peculiar, his manners are so carefully measured, the film lies on his shoulders and he doesn't care. This is an actor so talented that he hasn't turned twenty and you can trust him a whole movie.Duchovny doesn't even act in the film, but he shouldn't because this project means for him as a director; as a storyteller. And it's difficult to classify his piece: full of power but difficult to understand, exciting but incomplete. I had a lot of expectations with "House of D"; in the end most of them were fulfilled, but I'm sure next time around Duchovny will find something really worthy inside his house and we will be amazed. Rule: No Robin Williams film is bad.

This film could be great. The cast is flawless, if only Duchovny had set it against an fictional prison in a fictional neighborhood. But he chose the Jefferson market Library as the focal point, during the later years of it's being a women's house of detention. The film takes place in 1973 , but the actual prison was deserted in the late 1950's till 1961. In 61 plans to make it a Library began, and it opened as a library in 1967. So setting the story in 1973 was totally inaccurate , since it had not been a prison for almost 20 years by that time.Details like this always ruin a film for me. If you don't know the history, it is still a very good film.