Great acting, terrible characters
I'm not sure if the audience is supposed to like Lu, because I couldn't stand her. There wasn't anything redeeming about her at all.
shareShe put her life on the line to try and save the baby. She is a flawed person, but her intentions are pure.
shareHelping the baby didn't have to mean stealing her. She could have contacted the hotel staff so easily about the problem with mother and child. They would have handled it much better.
shareBut then we wouldn't have a movie, would we?
shareTired of seeing this response to the irrational actions of movie characters. Just because it's fictional doesn't mean we have to accept everything they do. Kidnapping a baby is an incredibly stupid thing to do. Like the OP said, you call hotel staff, the police, or child protective services.
If the only defense is, "Well that's why it's a movie.", then more thought probably should have went into the plot. Nothing wrong with a flawed character, but Lu seems sociopathic some of the time, and mentally handicapped at others.
Just a poorly written film, in my opinion.
Every movie has to follow its own internal logic. The Wizard of Oz is "Just a movie" but if it had shown the Wicked Witch of the West swimming laps in a pool and then later someone dumps a bucket on her and she melts, that is lack of movie logic. All stories have to have a logic to their storytelling. They don't have to be REALISTIC in terms of the real world (like the Wizard of Oz) but movies and any story has to be believable, and consistent, inside the fictional world the writers created.
One of the things I enjoyed in this movie was the evolution of the Allison Janney character. Janney isn't beautiful, but with her height and her huge eyes and great hair, she's striking. At the beginning she was completely drab looking. Drab clothes, hair parted in the middle hanging around her face. Gradually her hair and make-up got warmer and better as she continued to bond with Lu. She looked almost completely different by the end of the movie.
BTW, Janney and Blanchard were both on GL. It was Blanchard's first job. Janney wasn't on contract, but she played a comic relief maid, paired with a short, bubbly blonde. They just had sort of Greek chorus lines. I used to watch that show, and first words out of Janney's mouth, I thought - boy, she is a GOOD actress. In fact, to me, she was clearly a better actress than anyone else on that show. Despite it being a soap opera, there were some decent actors on that show (like Maeve Kinkead and even the young Tammy Blanchard). But Janney was clearly in another league. About a year after she started working on GL she got cast in a play, and the rest is history (the industry doesn't watch soap operas, but casting people do go to the theatre).
I agree that Janney is fantastic. First movie I noticed her in was The Way Way Back. She has great comedic timing.
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