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

From my favorite movies..

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This film is like watching writer/director Sally Potter masturbate. Most people will be almost instantly repelled. A few will be somewhat perversely attracted, but after 10 minutes even those few will want her to finish up and move on to something else.Let me be up front with the two pieces of information that will conclusively let you know if this movie is anything with which you should bother. First, the two main characters don't have names. They're identified in the credits only as She and He. Other characters have names, just not them. Second, all the dialog is in verse. Yes, that's right. IT FRICKIN' RHYMES.Think about those two things for 30 seconds.Okay. The impression you now have in your mind is exactly what this movie is like. You also probably understand what I meant by near instantaneous repulsion and how those not repelled will quickly tire of it.The plot concerns She (Joan Allen), a middle aged American with pretensions of Irishness who's living a cold and sterile life in England with her distant husband Anthony (Sam Neill). She gets caught up with the swarthy He (Simon Abkarian), an Arab cook who used to be a doctor back in Beirut. You probably know what Joan Allen looks like. Imagine a Muslim Fabio, slightly shriveled with black hair and a porn stache and that's Simon Abkarian. That's not exactly a great couple to look at, is it?She and He meet, have their liaisons and inevitably break up, all the while spewing supposed profundities at each other in various pentameters. While that's going on, Anthony grooves to the blues in his living room and there's some completely unnecessary and oddly included stuff with Grace (Stephanie Leonidas), the daughter of She's best friend. Potter also utilizes a recurring gag of cleaning people looking knowingly into the camera and out at the audience. One cleaning woman even waxes endlessly about dirt as a sociological metaphor. Eventually, She's aunt is dragged out of the ether to deliver a too long soliloquy and then die, sending She to Cuba of all places while He heads back to Beirut. Will love reunited She and He? By that point in the film, I couldn't have given a tinker's dam. If these two characters had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up in Eli Roth's Hostel, I would have cried tears of joy as they were graphically tortured to death.For the last half of this baloney, there were only two words that reverberated in my head like the voice of God. Those words were…just end. I wanted Yes to be over as badly as any experience I've ever had. There have been nights I've been hunched on top of the toilet, bowels twisting in painful constipation, hoping and praying for relief. That's how much I desperately wanted this movie to be done.Yes is filled with very long scenes of monologue and dialog which are more than competently performed, though nonetheless interminable. I can appreciate the actors must have delighted in being able to exercise their talents in a way not usually possible in a motion picture. Any pleasure for the audience, however, vanishes after about 10 minutes of hearing the rhyming beats of the script clanging against their ears.Yes is close to unbearable. Sally Potter shouldn't be allowed to make another movie. She shouldn't be allowed to see another movie. She should move to Calcutta and wash the feet of the poor as penance for the suffering she's inflicted on the world through this film.

I suppose for some, this movie has some redeeming qualities. For me, however, I found myself hitting the fast-forward button through 75% of the film. First of all, the attempt at having all of the characters dialog rhyme was extremely distracting and so removed from real life that it made the already uninteresting plot even more unbearable.Since I spent most of the time fast-forwarding through what seemed to me as the ridiculous and mundane, you should really watch the movie for yourself and make your own judgements. Maybe you'll get lucky and actually be able to get into it.One word of advice, rent this movie first prior to purchasing. You'll be glad you did. I'll be putting my copy up for sale on eBay.

I would have enjoyed YES more if i had merely listened to it. Watching it was less than satisfying and sometimes painful. The camera work was right out of film school and was annoying. Granted some location photography was excellent....the colors and costume and locations obviously well thought out. The trouble for me was that I did not and could not give a hoot about the lovers.....boring was the thought that most often came to mind. That and i kept picturing other actors in those roles, and then i'd be reminded of other movies that had a similar story line but were so much more fun to watch. On a positive note, I enjoyed the young woman who began and closed the movie...the maid, but kept wishing the movie had been about her.bob Leonard

A lovely and challenging film, wonderfully acted. Complex people leading complex lives and wondering what it all means. Past experiences intrude and haunt present relationships. Lovers caress the present, yet are conflicted by their historic obligations to others and to the values they carry into the relationship. But this is a movie in which you understand the electric attraction of these two characters, who should never have even spoken, let alone found each others. And--I think this is simply an amazing bit of craftsmanship in this day of overblown special effects--words of love and conflict are spoken in iambic pentameter so seamlessly that the viewer barely is aware of it. Not many films are so successfully erotic and political at the same time. It is a gem.