Disc Reviews

I’m not a big fan of “Reality TV.” I do watch Survivor, and I think that’s a really good show, but I don’t watch any of the others. When I first heard of the concept of “The Mole,” I have to admit that I was intrigued. Reality TV is all about real people reacting to each other’s most annoying personality traits and translating that friction into ratings. Well, “The Mole” puts a different spin on that concept by adding a dissenting element - one of the participants is “a mole” i.e. a nefarious agent of the producers ...laced to lead the group astray and prevent them from attaining the big cash rewards. I have to admit intriguing, but not intriguing enough to get me to watch week to week, until now.

Celebrity Mole: Hawaii takes a group of B-list celebrities (Stephen Baldwin, Corbin Bernsen, Michael Boatman, Kim Coles, Kathy Griffin, Frederique Van Der Wal, and Erik Von Detten) and pits them against each other in various games to win cash, and avoid termination (i.e. elimination – one person leaves the game at the end of each show) while figuring out who the mole is.

As a music lover, the phrase, “written by Paul McCartney” almost always signifies excellence in the performance to come. For a movie lover, this is not necessarily the case. Sure, A Hard Day’s Night is a great film, Help! is better than average, and Yellow Submarine is a fun departure from mainstream animation. Heck, even Magical Mystery Tour has a campy sort of charm to it.

Apparently, the same rule that applies to music also applies to cinema; without the rest of The Beatles, P...ul McCartney’s talent is just not the same. Sure, he can act fairly well, and the music is way above average, but taken as a whole, this film just plain stinks. The plot here is extremely thin. I have seen many _ hour sitcoms with more plot lines than this film. If you were to take out all of the musical numbers, you would probably have about 40 minutes of actual dialog. The rest of the film is filled with musical breaks.

In today’s age of manufactured talent less pop stars you have to hand it to the artists that still write and actually perform their own original material. Versus the one’s who simply head into the studio with a team of writers and producers and who don’t even have the talent to actually sign live but instead just lip sync. Jewel whether you like her music or not is an artist, she writes her own material and even co-produced her last album. At times she is incredibly engaging at other times slightly annoying but, her ...yrics are richly textured and captivate the imagination.

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