i think this movie is cute ( mainly b/c Jude was there), not great or even good, just ok to watch on tv (that's what i did). but dose it really deserve a 6.5? shoudn't it be much lower ( around a 4 or 5)?
don't get me wrong it wasn't a horrible movie, it just dosen't deserve a 6.5 in my opinion.
I totally agree the onlt reason I ever watched this movie was because Jude Law and Jeremy Piven were in it and man did I have a hard time not just shutting it off. I ended up fast forwarding through a lot of it. It was more predictable than Titanic and we all knew the boat was going to sink going into it. The movie wasn't terrible but it was not good either.
shareWell, I might as well give the other side. Rating films is always going to be very subjective, but I know solid plot, acting, direction, composition, and scoring when I see it.
I would give it a 9, and believe me I don't give 9's lightly. Now, most of my favorites are films such as IN HARM'S WAY, THE DEVIL'S BRIGADE, EL DIABLO, RIO BRAVO, you get the picture, but a great romance like this one is also very pleasing and gets my praise.
This is a more perfect romance than any other that I can think of at present. There is one outstanding, beautifully acted, filmed, and directed scene after another. The Danny/Anna chemistry is sizzling. Jesus and Nina are pretty great together too. Brenda Blethyn's Grace is wonderful, and Jon Tenney's soft spoken Eric is well done. Every one of the others, down to the character actors in incidental roles, does a fine job.
This is Gretchen Mol's perfect, best-of-career movie, and Jennifer Tilly gives a wonderful performance, in a difficult role quite different from her usual parts.
The music is very well chosen and sets the mood excellently.
I don't know, it's a fair movie. It's written so well yet directed in such a lackluster fashion that it's hard to believe that one fellow handled both duties on this project. Maybe he was strecthed too thin?
The movie has a pretty unique vibe to it early on, but the second act feels so strewn together it's hard to watch. Lousy cinematography and the entire film looks like a "Lifetime TV Movie of the Week", and very poor sequencing concerning the entire Swan family.
Martha Plimpton's character is pretty one-note and appears in very few scenes; she's criminally underused here. In the scene at the end of the film, she sitting at a table flicking her lighter on and off. She looks as bored as I would have been in a theater, and the other characters have little to no chemistry as a whole; they seem LESS like a family and more like a bunch of actors sitting around a table waiting for cues. And why even cast Bruce Jarchow if you're not planning on giving him more than a few lines? He's the patriarch of the family, for heaven's sake and he's barely aroung to phone in his appearance as Richard Swan.
Something else I noted: according to my satellite system company, Richard Ruccolo gets third billing in this film (meaning his name is one of three to appear in the credits in the film info). I don't know if I missed him very early on in the movie, but AFAIK he only appears in one scene (albeit for only 10-15 seconds) and has NO lines. He's sitting along the wall in the bakery when Karen and Danny enter and she begins her tirade against the "semi-literate yahoo". I know my Richard Ruccolo, but I have to wonder: why does he deserve such a credit when he is in fact nothing more than an extra? If you reached down to tie your shoe you'd never have even seen him there.
The final straw is not so much a fault of the film itself, but it is burdened by the wretched and overtly sappy "Truly, Madly, Deeply" by Savage Garden, possibly one of the worst possible atrocities dealt the listening public in the 20th century. It's the kind of song four grade girls perform for each other at slumber parties, and has no symbolic resonance for the film whatsoever. It's as if the producers thought "hey, let's find the most embarrassing love song on the current charts and play it repeatedly throughout our film".
My Scoring:
It's a film: 6.5 point base
Great first act: +3 points
Martha Plimpton's acerbic wit: +2 points
While great looking, neither Mol nor Law have chemistry: -1 point
Cheap looking sets but no independent fervor: -1 point
Tilly's romance with 'Jesus': +1 point
Underusing Jarchow, Plimpton and Ruccolo: -1.5 points
Poe's "Fly Away": +1 point
Savage Garden's "Truly, Madly, Deeply": -1 point
Savage Garden's "Truly, Madly, Deeply": -1 point
Savage Garden's "Truly, Madly, Deeply": -1 point
Predictable, rushed second act: -2 points
If I added correctly, the movie gets a 5/10. I think if someone else had directed it with more zeal, it could have been a minor classic. By the way, the sat. rating for this was 2.5/4 stars... not far off from the 6.5/6.6 rating listed here.
Hilarious that someone's "5" is another's "9". Were both watching the same movie? If I see a nine or ten rating by someone when the average is five or lower, then the 9/10'ers either don't get out to see movies very often, or they rate movies on how it personally affected them. The acting, directing, camera work could stink, but if it nailed its message to a certain viewer, then it's the best movie ever (a 10!). This is like rating music. The really bad stuff and the really good stuff usually sort themselves out, while the stuff in the middle goes into an epic battle of opinions/ratings between the haters and lovers.
I'm not into these movies at all, but I usually walk in when my girlfriend has them on the TV. This time, I walked in on the death scene and taken out of context, I thought it was the most overacted scene ever. When she started cry-talking in that voice, I had to leave the room so not to ruin the movie for my GF with all my laughing. As Jon Lovitz would say, ACTING!!!
To all you 9/10'ers, enjoy the best movie ever!
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A 6.5? I was hard pressed to give this horribly maudlin drivel a 2. The Gretchen Mol character is not only unbelievably childish but is superstitious to the point of relying on the outcome of a coin flip to determine her future. Jane Adams runs around with a gun threatening her husband with no repercussions even after she loads it and shoots him. Jennifer Tilly seemingly going from being frightened of all strangers to marrying one on very shirt notice None of these people act as adults ever. The script, in my opinion, certainly deserves the 2 I awarded it.
Only two things are actually knowable:
It is now and you are here. All else is merely a belief.