Really enjoyed this. Thought the previews, and the title, were a bit misleading however. It’s really not the story of a couple as much as it is the story of Celeste dealing with the ending of her relationship and finding a new road.
The music was lovely, the acting was nice, and sure it was sweet and somewhat predictable but it’s not the Hollywood ending and it’s not a slam you down ending either. Nice.
I felt degraded and abused enough–and perhaps unable to ever eat chicken again–after this movie that I just cannot recommend it.
Sure, Matthew McConaughey does his role very well. So what? Sometimes that’s not enough to make a movie worth sitting through. (See “There Will Be Blood.” Career performance from DDL does not make that a movie I ever, ever, ever want to see again.)
Also: Every Single Person in this movie is a shallow jerk. You have no one to root for! NO ONE! Even the presumed naive victim just seems dumb, not wounded or someone you should care about.
Icky.
I really liked this in the end but it feels pretty formulaic for about the first 20-30 minutes. It seems like they’re giving too much away and you think “how are they going to drag this out for 2 hours” but then a new element gets added in. So I thought it got a lot more complex as it went along and in the end there were characters I really cared about the outcome for. Emily Blunt is amazing.
Did feel like Piper should have turned that role down or perhaps pointed out that the nudity was completely gratuitous (her character was clearly destitute without that).
Plus JGL and the director were there for a post-movie Q&A (I saw it at a screening a month or so before it came out) and JGL was wearing bright green socks and being super cute. So perhaps that colored my reaction. PERHAPS.
So ridiculous and actually pretty bad, I was very disappointed. Woody and what’s her name seemed like they had just met an hour before, not been married for years and that was just one of the things in this movie that was off kilter. Super stiff dialogue.
I recommend you watch Midnight in Paris instead.
Liked it but not as much as I wanted to. (Didn’t fulfill my Ben Affleck fangirl needs, frankly. I don’t feel any urge to see this one again whereas I am still not done rewatching The Town.)
Didn’t feel as tense as I expected. Saw Arbitrage a week or whatever later and that was MUCH MORE the tension I felt should have been in Argo.
Acceptable enough but didn’t live up to the hype.
Yes, there are holes you could find in the plot after the fact.
BUT I really liked this movie, both in the moment and afterward. It was super tense, pulled out almost to the breaking point, and there were some really excellent performances.
I liked it even more after listening to director Nicholas Jarecki’s interview on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell, my favorite and most often listened to podcast.
The one place I felt the movie really faltered was in the girlfriend/Richard Gere relationship. Make us think he actually loves her and this film would be that much stronger. As it is, she’s too irrelevant for some of the plot points.
I thought this movie was a completely convoluted mess. But apparently that opinion may get you death threats. So, yeah, I liked it just fine. #butnot
Anne Hathaway was great and certainly the best part of the movie.
This may be a spoiler (but come on, the movie’s been out for a month).
The biggest of many ridiculous things about this movie: if you’re going to put your villain in a face mask, HAVE A LEGIT (& LOGICAL) REASON FOR IT. And have it be meaningful within the plot of the film.
It gets harder and harder to make it through movies with kids in bad situations. This is a very emotionally affecting movie that thankfully has enough of a fairy tale aspect to not throw you completely into despair. I was really swept into the story and definitely needed kleenex for the last 10 minutes or so.
On the other hand, while it completely works within the mood & tone of the film, but there is a LOT of soft-focus fuzzy filmmaking throughout the flick and there were several points at which my eyes had just really had enough of that (I’m such a cranky old lady).
The problem with this movie exists at the very deepest level of plot: if these characters are brother & sister, they can’t wind up together and all their great chemistry is to no effect.
So while there were things I liked and some nice performances, it’s ultimately not what the viewer of a romance really wants to see. And the romance that does feature as a B-plot was shown so minutely in the film that you never really get to root for it.
I don’t think I know a single other person who saw this. It was crazy hot that day, and I can’t afford to turn on my air conditioning, and it was the only movie starting within the next 30 minutes. Also: Chris Pine is yummy.
One of those “let’s make up a baloney plot as an excuse to sing these songs” movies (see also “Mama Mia”).
It was just as bad as you can possibly imagine except for two things:
1) How awesome to hear all these songs again all one after the other.
2) Tom Cruise KILLS IT. Say what you will about him, but when he COMMITS to a role, he COMMITS. This was as thunderously over-the-top yet wonderful as his Tropic Thunder performance. He’s the only one who doesn’t visibly appear to be lip syncing (even if they are all lip syncing to their own vocals/recordings of these songs). He’s the only one that just outright goes for the ridiculousness of his part.