Delivering Milo

A classic story of redemption, Delivering Milo has great performances, humor, and perhaps a few tears. I watch a lot of films and often tire of Hollywood's penchant for the cynical. If you're looking for a positive message, Delivering Milo delivers.

Aside from the sentimental value it's also an excellent creative concept. It will certainly hold your interest, and it does tug on the heartstrings a bit. But hey, if you're feeling too good about life after this film, just watch the evening news, that'll slap you back to reality.

While I don't have time to go into the detail that the previous reviewer provided, I have a completely different take on "Delivering Milo." I enjoyed the film as did my children and I believe it will generate plenty of word of mouth recommendations and have a strong life in video. It is a melodrama but, hey, Stephen King calls "The Green Mile" a melodrama. Albert Finney does a great job as the n'er-do-well from Limbo and Bridget Fonda never looked more beautiful as a nine-months-pregnant woman. The supporting cast is great.

I saw this movie just a few hours ago at the Cleveland International Film Festival and I found it to be an excellent movie.

I must strongly disagree with the other reviewers who've panned the movie.

I'll admit that the movie has a few Hollywood elements and better-than-indie production values. It also has an understated, but important, plot element that involves religion. It's also sentimental, it could be classified as a date movie or even a "family movie."

This is a wonderful movie about freedom and redemption. I found it well-crafted, well-acted (Albert Finney is just terrific) and for a movie with a bit of fantasy, very much believable on that level with few plot holes. Yes, you just might figure out a few things half or three-quarters of the way thru the flick, but so what.

I would urge anyone thinking about seeing this movie to reject the too-critical reviews. It's not a Coppola flick and it doesn't pretend to be. But it's not "Ghost" either. This movie delivers what it promises - a good yarn, told, acted and directed well.

On a slightly peripheral note, I see that this movie, finished in 2000, has yet to find a distributor. This movie would be a winner at the box office. I'm not a moviemaker, but I have a few friends who are. I've heard them complain about not being able to find distributors for their very indie movies. NOW I understand.

Want to just have a nice, enjoyable evening out at the movies? Then go see Milo.

its beauty seems be an old fashion one. and this does it special. because it is one of films who looking for values in convincing way. and, for an admirer of Anton Yelchin, like me, it is a kind of refuge. for the others, I suppose, it is a great film for admirable performances, for a story sweet-bitter, for Bridget Fonda performance and for Albert Finney proposing a real provocative perspective about duty of an angel and the virtues of friendship. so, a real, real beautiful film. with entire classic potential.

Probably a bad combination: watching a movie like this while reading William Goldman's "Which Lie Did I Tell?", among other things an incisive (and often hilarious) dissection of all the things that can go wrong in the development of a screenplay. So, here I am in an airplane, with "Which Lie Did I Tell?" in my lap, and "Delivering Milo" on the screen...

If I had to give the shortest accounting of the problem with "Milo," it would be: if you know where you're going, the journey better be the part with the surprises. And there just aren't a lot of surprises. This is a screenplay that starts with a cute concept, wraps with a cash-cow ending, and leaves out anything memorable or really enjoyable in the middle.

Performances were, well, mediocre. Albert Finney was good in many places, but has morphed distractingly into William "Priceline" Shatner's doppleganger in appearance. I kept thinking this would have been a *great* showcase role for George Carlin; he would have put quite a bit more edge and humor into it.

Bridget Fonda was fine but not spectacular, the actor playing her husband veers heavily into Robert Hays territory, and Lesley Ann Warren is pretty much wasted as yet another brassy dame, a muted turn on her role in Victor/Victoria. The kid playing Milo was apparently cloned off of Elijah Wood Jr.'s genetic material, although not entirely successfully.

But the "camp counselors" ...what happened here? Did they raid a sophomore high school drama class en masse, with no consideration for who might have talent? Or did the director just think it would make things even more zany and off-kilter if everyone trotted out their most bogus, high-falutin' accent? I did think Alison Lohman was awfully pretty, though.

All that being said, I still got all watery-eyed at the ending, and the one riff I *didn't* see hurtling through the Holland Tunnel hours in advance was the very last little tidbit, which I did like. But touching family moments will do that to me every time -- you can reel me in with an AT&T ad -- that doesn't mean the filmmakers didn't waste a moderately interesting premise by forgetting to write a compelling middle.

5/10