Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Prismark10 Wild Palms begins with a dream sequence involving a rhinoceros. There are shots from the director which aim to be cinema such as the scene of the waiter standing by at the table when Jim Belushi and Ernie Hudson are at the restaurant to the jump shot to a maid standing by the table as his kids are eating.Wild Palms was produced by Olive Stone and episodes were directed by film directors such as Kathryn Bigelow, Phil Joanou.The setting is is a future 2007 where men were collarless shirts with ties, drive 1960s cars and women have fashion owing a lot to Japan and oddly there is no wifi.There are however powerful media moguls experimenting with Virtual Reality and a Scientologist like cult, right wing corporate politicians, secret police and a band of libertarian rebels who see the bigger picture of this corporate America and want to stop the Senator (Robert Loggia.)Jim Belushi who plays a family mind drawn into this new media world as his wife starts to drink heavily, his son is getting to be a powerful child star and his mother in law (Angie Dickinson) has powerful connections to this dark side of society.Wild Palms certainly brings you a world of soap opera-ish wild ride dominated by Angie Dickinson's performance. It was designed as event television but its big problem was that it came after the TV series Twin Peaks and we the viewers had become spoilt. Wild Palms seemed like a retread with its visual tricks, surreal dream sequences even though part of it owed more to Cronenberg's movie Videodrome.Looking at it now it comes across as campy whereas Twin Peaks has aged better.

x1nd0lent I remember when Wild Palms was originally shown amid much hype in 1993, but have only seen it now that it comes to DVD.Imagine an adventure of cyberpunk intrigue which takes place in a near future world where VR ("Virtual Reality", for those too young or old to have assimilated the 90's buzzword for telepresence) is hitting the media mainstream; all in an environment of weird religious cults and treacherous politics. A cutting-edge commentary on the effects of new media.But in reality, there was very little of this! It seems to me that the writers were worried that these heady concepts were not quite ready for prime-time acceptance, and took pains to dilute them quite a bit. The production looks great for its time, and some of the actors fit their roles quite well - especially Robert Loggia and Angie Dickenson. In the six sprawling episodes of the miniseries, not a lot really happens. There is not a lot of character development. Many of the actors could have handled more substantial roles - Belushi, Bebe Neuwirth, especially David Warner and Brad Dourif come to mind. Rather than a well crafted mystery, there is mostly conceit that something sinister is going on which the main character is unaware of, explanations of which are spooned to us in small portions. The dialogue was often quite good, if sparse. The cult and VR aspects really struck me as being pretty superfluous, the "media manipulation of social reality" idea didn't bring anything which couldn't have been explained in terms of newspapers or television - apart from the fact that people interacting with "holograms" (while on designer drugs, no less!) afforded a few opportunities for fun photographic trickery.Wild Palms seems to me very much a product of its time. In the US at least everybody was jumping onto the internet bandwagon, techno music hit the mainstream, immersive VR became practical, the little-understood prefix "cyber-" became linked to countless names, just as "electro-" and "astro-" had been hyped decades before. I'd recommend Wild Palms to those who may never have thought about this sort of scenario before, as a bit of an introduction. More than ten years earlier, the film "Network" covered many of the same ideas in much less time, more memorably, and with far more style. For better examples of watered-down cyberpunk fiction for television I'd rather recommend ABC's short-lived series "Max Headroom" and the recent animated series "Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex". It is not a bad show, but where Wild Palms falls short is in the promise of revealing how combining new media with the older routines of people's obsessions and ideas of self- interest can result in interesting shifts in society, and in the societal consensus of reality itself. Too little, too late, I'd say.And what was the deal with that cameo of William Gibson?

dgarwood The real credit for WILD PALMS should go to Bruce Wagner and his flowing, prosaic dialogue. It's like classic Film Noir crossed with cyber-speak, doused with a fifth of Single Malt Scotch and set on fire. There are so many clever, nimble phrases that are turned on their axis and spun into something entirely different. Examples: "Mystery loves company." "Do you know how much it hurts to be SHOT IN THE CHEST??""You're no General! You're a pimp with the wings of a bat!" "You've got quite a mouth on you! Take care someone doesn't take a needle and sew it up." "Weak dog! You stillborn calf! YOU MAKE ME VOMIT!"Granted the whole package is a little hard to take in all at once - it's one of those things that becomes more interesting the more you watch it. And for everyone who argues it ends with a whimper, not a bang, well, you may be right, but I posit that The Senator, Harry's real lineage, The Go Chip, and the Mimezine are all besides the point. Enjoy it for one of the campiest, cleverest, most intelligent scripts ever written for television.(Thank You Bruce Wagner) This is a project that is not only entertaining to watch, but a JOY to listen to. It's FUN.

george.schmidt WILD PALMS (1993) **1/2 (MADE FOR TV) Jim Belushi, Kim Cattrall, Angie Dickinson, Robert Loggia, Brad Savage, Nick Mancuso, Dana Delaney, David Warner, Ernie Hudson, Brad Dourif, Robert Morse. Oliver Stone produced this bizarre tv miniseries about the unsteady future with Loggia as the head of a cult-like society brainwashing America with technology, virtual reality and good all-time fascism. Running amok on all cylinders with some eye candy visuals and shades of David Lynchian nightmares. Quirky.