Reviews

There's been quite a bit of pre-Oscar buzz about American Fiction, which on its surface is a film about a frustrated black American writer & professor named Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffery Wright) who decides to write a "ghetto" book (replete with hood vernacular) as a big F-U to the publishing world when his latest high-minded serious fiction fails to find a publisher. He then has to deal with the personal and professional fallout when his snarky joke book becomes a runaway success. When I first saw an overview of the movie, I was immediately reminded of Spike Lee's Bamboozled, in which a unsuccessful, frustrated black TV executive successfully pitches a sketch show where the actors perform in blackface. However, this isn't actually a great comparison.

In Bamboozled, Spike Lee hit us with quite a bit of finger pointing and "shame on you"-ing as he tried to make Americans reconcile with a past (and occasional present) where black entertainers are only allowed to be racist caricatures. There's real footage of Al Jolson and other early 20th century "minstrel show" entertainers spliced into the movie and the end result is mostly a depressing guilt trip. Like most of Spike's oeuvre, his aim is to entertain, get a few laughs here and there, and ultimately deliver his Big Message about race relations.

American Fiction's message as I took it, is less about race and more about the place of art and artists in 21st century, multi-national corporate subsidized entertainment. (It seems especially appropriate that the movie was published by MGM, whose long-time motto has been the Latin ars gratia artis, or, "art for art's sake") There's a hint right at the beginning of the movie when Monk is teaching a university class about literature and has written the n-word on the whiteboard at the front of the class. He has a heated debate with one of his students about how much she dislikes the word to which Monk replies, "I got over it, so I think you can too." Indeed, American Fiction doesn't actually do much hand wringing, finger pointing, or tear shedding about race and prefers instead to focus on intra-family dynamics and how art makes its way to modern audiences.

The scenes that truly get at the heart of the film's message come when Monk is touring a decent, but not luxurious care home for his mother (Leslie Uggams) whose ability to care for herself is being rapidly destroyed by newly diagnosed Alzheimer's Disease. When one of the care home's managers tells Monk that the cost is $5600 a month, what choice does he have other than to ride his sell-out success to the finish line when the cost of even basic care is equal to a mortgage payment? His family counts 2 doctors in its ranks and once upon a time, a large middle-class family with two doctors in it would have no problem covering the cost of care for a senile matriarch. In inflation-ravaged 21st century America however, this isn't the case. As much as it pains Monk's pride and his mission as an artist with important things to say, family comes first, so he must continue to sell out to the highest bidder.

Besides its nuanced messages about art, capitalism, and audience taste, American Fiction is actually a comedy at its core. Most of the film's laughs come from Jeffery Wright's pained facial expressions, his attempts to portray himself as a "hard" black man from the streets for his joke book's credibility, and his increasingly outrageous, "I can't believe they think this trash is good writing" suggestions when he's dealing with book publishers and Hollywood producers. It is a genuinely funny movie. For this alone, I am grateful that it exists. Good comedy is rare, and good comedy that also has important messages about art, family, and capitalism even more so.

It's not a perfect movie by any means - the ultimate ending is darkly comic, but it tries to be a bit too cute with the 4th wall & narrative on its way there. And while this is very minor and nit-picky, for a movie set in and around Boston, they don't really attempt to capture the nuances of accent, language, and demeanour for the region. This is a family from Anytown, USA that just so happens to be set in Boston and Cape Cod.

If you're expecting a movie that preaches and pontificates about race and the modern black condition in America, this is not it. But it is hilarious, literary, well-paced, well-acted, and massively entertaining. So go see it.

I'm not sure who or what is to blame, but the last few years of films from some of Hollywood's most reliable directors have been massively disappointing - Christopher Nolan, (Tenet, Oppenheimer) Quentin Tarantino, (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Marty Scorcese, (The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon) Paul Thomas Anderson, (Licorice Pizza) and now we have to add Edgar Wright as well.

Wright is of course responsible for the stellar Cornetto trilogy, (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World's End) movies that people will probably still be watching 100 years from now. With these movies, Wright built his own sub-genre which combined razor-sharp comic timing, quick-fire pacing, and existing genre tropes. They were rightfully massive successful and beloved by swathes of people. With Last Night in Soho, Wright leaves behind humour and whiplash pacing for an absolute slog of straight ahead psychological horror and I'm sorry to say that he has failed completely in his transition away from his established style.

The story begins with university aged woman Ellie, who's obsessed with all things 60's swingin' London and leaves her quiet country life in Cornwall to attend fashion school in the capitol. Her grandma (Rita Tushingham) dotes on and worries about the fragile Ellie and warns her not to let the big bad city eat her alive. Ellie also has visions of her dead mother, but we're not sure if these visions are the hallucinations of a mentally unwell young woman, glimpses into a supernatural realm a la The Shining, or something else altogether. Things go predictably awry almost immediately for the vulnerable Ellie from her first day in the city. Lecherous cab drivers stalk her, her dorm roommate hates her, and she decides to move into a dingy old Soho bedsit run by matronly old spinster Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg) just to have a little peace and quiet. But as soon as she moves into her new home, visions of her mother are replaced by a stunning blonde wanna-be starlet named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) who like Ellie, is new to Soho and vulnerable to its myriad dangers. From here, Ellie's story basically stops and we now follow Sandie via Ellie's fever dreams / visions / hallucinations of her as her dreams of stardom give way to a life as a high-class prostitute. If that sounds like a convoluted structure in theory, it's just as bad in practice.

Ellie eventually becomes so consumed by Sandie that she dyes her hair blonde, begins dressing like her, and devotes her waking life to finding justice for Sandie, whom she believes was murdered by a man that she sees walking the streets of present day Soho. There's a big twist at the end that you won't care about because by that point, you're exhausted watching Ellie as she's tortured by gruesome visions of Sandie.

Wright seems to want to moralize with this one, and some background knowledge of Soho as London's notorious sex-worker neighbourhood is needed to piece his message together because it's not exactly explained directly in the movie. Shame on all the men he seems to say, who might consider soliciting these vulnerable young women's services when they simply wanted to achieve their dreams. At one point in the film where Ellie's empathy for Sandie is at its peak, he even seems to suggest that death(!) is appropriate justice for these men who trade their pay for an hour or two of a young woman's time on a mattress. While this review isn't the place for debating the morality of sex work, even the most conservative cultures and religions don't go as far as condemning men to death for taking part in it. It's an extremely weird take and doubly so coming from the laddish Wright.

The narrative is a mess, you end up hating the main characters, and the whole affair is utterly joyless save for a few stylish flashback sequences featuring Sandie. On that note, Anya Taylor-Joy is the only thing worth watching in this movie (well her and the fantastic use of R. Dean Taylor's eternal banger "There's a Ghost in My House") and it's hard to take your eyes off her when she's on screen as Sandie. It makes me wish there was a different version of this movie that was entirely about her character without the split-storytelling. Oh well.

"Write what you know", goes the old adage - and for Edgar Wright that's zombie movies, buddy-cop action movies, and pub humour. Leave vulnerable young woman psychological horror and feminist moralizing to someone else.

Marty Scorcese went viral a little while back for speaking ill of Marvel movies and superhero movies in general. It was interesting because I think a lot of big name producers and directors in Hollywood probably felt the same way but very few had voiced these opinions publicly, perhaps scared that they'd cost themselves a big fat paycheck in the future. So here was Mr. Mean Streets himself standing up for film as art and not for big, stupid, meaningless spectacle masquerading as film - kudos to you Marty. However, when you criticize someone else who does the same thing that you do, you better be able to back it up by doing better than they did. Killers of the Flower Moon makes me wonder if he was the right man to stand up for cinema.

The first 20-30 minutes of the film are interesting - it feels like a unique movie unfolding in a unique way. We've got simple country bumpkin Ernest returning from non-combat duty in WW1, staying with his uncle William "Bill" Hale at his big country house in the heart of Osage Indian territory in Oklahoma. The Osage are rich with oil money and everyone wants a piece of it. Uncle Bill wastes no time informing Ernest that he would do well to get himself married into that money as quickly as possible as an eligible bachelor with no real prospects. The self-professed greedy and lazy Ernest agrees with this plan and gets to work meeting the wealthy tribal women of his newly adopted town. However, love gets in the way of his scheme when he develops genuine feelings for a beautiful Osage woman named Mollie.

From this point forward in the movie, it reverts from being an original and interesting movie into being Goodfellas: Osage Edition. So if you've seen Goodfellas (and hopefully you have, because it's an excellent movie) you don't really need to watch the rest of Killers of the Flower Moon. While you might be thinking, "well if I liked Goodfellas and this is just like that, then surely it must be a good movie" you would be very wrong. Goodfellas tells its story of easy living and endless betrayal via life in the mob with humour, excitement, and blistering pace. Killers of the Flower Moon on the other hand, tells its story of easy living and endless betrayal via oil money in a lumbering, predictable, and dull way. The movie is more than three hours long and there's at least an hour worth of unneeded film here. It's painful to sit and wait for the movie to conclude at hour 3 when most of it was done after 90 minutes.

The acting is good as you'd expect from DeNiro, DiCaprio, and relative newcomer Lily Gladstone as Ernest's wife Mollie. The problem is entirely with the structure, pacing, and editing of the film. I expected more from a director of Scorcese's calibre. One gets the sense that at 80 years old, maybe he decided to hand this one off to some of his disciples who then moulded the film to fit the "Scorcese structure" done so well in Goodfellas and Casino. Whatever the case, it's a massively disappointing film that squanders its interesting real life source material in a tired and ill-fitting retread of the format that Scorcese pioneered with Goodfellas.

It's my understanding that PTA & QT are good friends - they hang out, watch movies, talk shop, and generally do all the things that two friends who have a shared profession would do. So it makes me wonder if PTA was influenced by QT's long in development Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to do his own, closer to home version set in the Valley. It's definitely a thing that happens amongst people employed in creative fields - you casually talk about ideas, you riff on things, and whether you can help or not, your contemporaries will likely influence you.

Unfortunately for us, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a bad movie. There were a lot of issues with it, but the main one was that QT attempted (and failed) to turn a collection of funny & interesting stories he had collected over the years about late 60s's-era Hollywood into a feature length movie. The stories themselves weren't bad (a middle aged stuntman who beats up Bruce Lee, weirdo cult hippies reaching critical mass at an abandoned movie ranch, etc.) but they weren't strong enough to build a movie around and they also didn't complement each other in any real way.

Licorice Pizza has similar designs and fails in the exact same ways - it has a better (and simpler) main story thread than Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so it's a bit better of a movie overall, but that's still not saying much. We have the same "3-beers-deep" tales of old Hollywood (middle aged actor & his friends set fire to a golf course and ride motorcycles around it, coked-up producer acting like a crazy idiot, etc.) that are sort of amusing in a way, but add nothing to the structure of the movie. And in the case of Licorice Pizza, they actually detract and take time away from what could have been a more textured love story. It's doubly frustrating because although we're introduced to the main characters' families, both of whom seem interesting in different ways, they're not given the same time and attention as some of these "tales from old Hollywood" side plots. It would have given us more depth and insight into the characters to see and hear from the families than it would to see them spend time with old Hollywood B-listers that they barely know or care about.

Another issue with Licorice Pizza is that PTA is the most out of his comfort zone that he's ever been. All of his best movies (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, the Master) deal with deeply flawed ensembles of losers. They're tragically comic - we laugh at and feel sad for these collections of broken human beings feeling their way around their careers, relationships, and their overall direction in life. In Licorice Pizza, we have two very charismatic and likeable main characters - Gary's a bit of hustler and Alana is a little slow to launch her life, but on the whole they are much more well-adjusted than PTA's usual characters. And ultimately it makes them not that interesting to watch. Of course two charming, mostly well-adjusted people are likely to be fascinated by each other and fall in love - yes there are some hurdles (age, differing ambitions, etc.) but you don't doubt for a second that the mutual admiration of these two very likeable people will eventually be consummated. It's like being the third person invited to dinner or drinks with two attractive friends who are deeply in love - you're happy for them and wish them well but you begin to feel like an interloper after spending enough time around them.

The best love story movies have longer odds than this and also tend to spend more time focused on the slow burn and building tension that new love brings. Licorice Pizza builds its love story well for a little while, then diverts its attention elsewhere, returns again, diverts again, and ultimately ends when it has nowhere left to go. It's disappointing as a love story that could have been more, and fails, exactly like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to use tales from old Hollywood as a base for some kind of deeper commentary about life as it was back then.

I've been disappointed over the past few years with horror movies that have been hyped and then failed to deliver. Midsommar and Get Out both come to mind - they're both OK but had too many flaws to be truly enjoyable. In Midsommar's case - some fairly unrealistic responses to the events that unfold. In Get Out's, some harsh tonal shifts that undermine some of the creepier moments. So I'm happy to report that Bird Box (which also had its share of hype upon release) is an excellent piece of horror / suspense that does actually deliver a mostly great movie-watching experience.

The premise is simple but fertile for horror: something is spreading through the world causing most people to kill themselves in violent and dramatic ways. The few survivors are left to figure out why they've survived and how to continue doing so.

Although this movie shares its DNA with some of the better zombie movies released in the past 25 years, it's different enough that both the mystery of the malevolent force and the limitations placed on the survivors make it feel like a fresh new take on the formula.

Sandra Bullock is fantastic and really brings you with her for some of the more emotional moments. Ditto the rest of the cast, including the surprising John Malkovich who is rarely in this kind of movie but gives a great performance here as an unlovable, bitter old widower who acts as a kind of begrudging patriarch to the survivors cohabitating with him in his home.

My only gripes are that it's just a little bit too slow to start, and I didn't really feel like the sisters we meet in the beginning(Bullock and Sarah Paulson) had believable chemistry. There's also a very long passage of time in the narrative that doesn't feel quite right. It's a leap needed to create some of the more emotional moments in the movie, so I can forgive it, but it owed the audience a little bit more exposition, explanation, and development for the amount of time that passes. There's also a slightly corny reunion at the very end that wasn't really needed and felt a bit forced.

These are minor gripes though and the majority of Bird Box is a great rollercoaster ride of suspense, survival, and horror with a good mix of emotionally powerful moments between its main characters.

Christopher Nolan was first known for a pair of movies that had experimental takes on chronology (Following & Memento) - so he's no stranger to trying things that are unconventional in the cinematic world. Prior to its release, he described Dunkirk as being his most experimental movie to date. That's quite a big statement to make considering the outré nature of the movies mentioned above. Unfortunately, while Dunkirk might succeed in being a unique take on the war genre, it fails as a movie.

Dunkirk tells the real-life tale (poorly, but I'll come back to this) of a crucial point in WW2 where France & England were pushed to the edge of continental Europe by Hitler's army. Trapped and with no chance of a successful push back inland, they needed nothing less than a miracle to guide them to the safe, not-yet-invaded shores of Albion. With the military already stretched thin, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his advisors make the decision to enlist every civilian in England with a boat to make the journey across the English channel to rescue their trapped lads. It is one of the most unique strategic moves in modern warfare and perhaps Nolan saw himself as the eccentric mad genius of Hollywood most suited to tell this singular tale in his own idiosyncratic way. This unprecedented military decision was fraught with pressure, both temporal and strategic and Nolan makes this pressure the focus of his film, rather than telling the story in a more high-level, wide-reaching way.

As we've all learned over the years from films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and countless others, war is two things: hellish and stupid. So why Nolan chooses to drill down so thoroughly into those two aspects is a bit bewildering. The average person doesn't need to be hit over the head with those fairly obvious observations. And in all the movies mentioned above, they manage to convey those two observations well without dedicating every single frame of film to them. Nolan on the other hand decides to make the most on-the-nose movie possible. There's immense time pressure to rescue the troops? Let's put a constantly ticking clock as the main motif of the soundtrack! War is futile and pointless? Let's kill a few main characters in the dumbest, clumsiest, most infuriating ways possible! And so on.

Because Nolan so totally and completely focuses on the unrelenting, overpowering, unbearable pressure of war, I hesitate to even call Dunkirk a movie in the traditional sense of the word. It's more like a movie-length gauntlet of extremely tense, grisly vignettes bookended by the thinnest of introductions and half a minute of an "ok we can finally exhale" ending. This total disregard for any kind of pacing was clearly intentional to show the pressured nature of the situation, but the end result leaves the viewer emotionally exhausted less than halfway through the movie. Unlike Full Metal Jacket, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan, there is no space made for levity, love, hope, or any other positive human emotion that an actual soldier in an actual war might employ to help get them through. In Dunkirk, there is only the unyielding pressure of war and the mad scramble to survive. Having never been in a war, perhaps that's much closer to the reality of it. But it makes for a bad movie - and a waste of some very talented actors.

If you're interested in the events leading up to the escape from Dunkirk, Darkest Hour is the better movie for that. If you're interested in an experimental war movie, 1917 is vastly more entertaining. Dunkirk is strictly for the most masochistic viewers who want their movie-going experience to feel the way that most wars feel to the people fighting them: hellish and stupid.

The Fighter is the story of "Irish" Micky Ward, his brother Dicky Ecklund, their dysfunctional families, and their shared struggles as they navigate the complicated worlds of professional boxing and crippling drug addiction in the hard-luck setting of mid 90's Lowell, Massachusetts.

If this sounds like great fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster, then you're in good company with Mark Wahlberg, who championed the making of this film. It has everything the movie going public typically loves in a movie: the underdog fighting against long odds, tense family drama, an easy love story, a few action packed fight scenes, lots of wacky, funny moments from its principal interesting character, a "based on a true story" tagline, and to top it all off, a nice happy ending. The Fighter succeeds in giving us that version of a Hollywood blockbuster, so kudos to Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell for crafting a critically and commercially successful movie in that format.

Unfortunately for the Fighter, this exact same story was told in a much more interesting, direct, and realistic way in the form of the 1995 HBO documentary High on Crack Street, which follows the real Dicky Ecklund and 2 other people as their lives are broken by crack addiction. I had seen this movie before I'd seen the Fighter, so it was especially difficult to see such a compelling, interesting, gritty story transformed into a big budget, formulaic Hollywood blockbuster with lots of famous stars.

To be fair to the Fighter, it does have some excellent performances from Christian Bale as Dicky and Melissa Leo as Dicky & Micky's mother. But it's also got a totally flat Mark Wahlberg who gives absolutely nothing to his performance as Micky Ward. This is par for the course for Wahlberg as he seems to have given up on acting some time around the early 2000s and has been playing various versions of himself since then. Amy Adams is fine as his girlfriend Charlene, but they don't really have much chemistry and their love story is the weakest part of the movie.

David O. Russell makes sense as a director, as his two best previous movies (Spanking the Monkey & Flirting With Disaster) were also movies with extremely dysfunctional families at their core. His last movie before the Fighter however, was the abysmally bad I Heart Huckabees, which saw him disappear from Hollywood for 5+ years after its release. So there's also an underlying element that the director himself is part of this underdog comeback story.

The frustrating thing about the Fighter is that its story *could* have been brought to the big screen in a more compelling way in the right hands and outside the format of the Hollywood blockbuster. Its potent, complex, real-life source material feels wasted in its reconstituted form as a feel-good Rocky wannabe when there so many other directions it could have gone. It also does a huge disservice to Micky Ward and the sport of boxing as a whole by implying that his success was largely down to a few magic words of pre-match strategy whispered by his brother. The Fighter has more than a few of these lame, pandering cliches peppered throughout. Interesting characters and setup in the first act eventually succumb to formulaic storytelling and there's no doubt what the rest of the movie will look like after about 30 minutes.

Ultimately the Fighter just barely works, but I can only recommend it as a supplement to High on Crack Street which is a much more interesting piece of both storytelling and film-making about the exact same people. In this case, the fact is better than the fiction.

When you're famous, influential, and responsible for a cultural zeitgeist or two like Jim Henson and George Lucas, who's going to have the guts to tell you when you have a bad idea?

Labyrinth was a bad idea. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say it was two bad ideas that combined to make an unwatchable movie.

What makes it so bad?

Well let's look at the premise of Labyrinth. At its heart it's basically Cinderella meets the Wizard of Oz. Not bad so far. But then mix in the art direction and character design of Where the Wild Things Are and the Muppets. OK, still not too bad, maybe getting slightly more muddled. But then also mix a few helpings of the Monty Python movies, the paintings of M. C. Escher, and Ziggy Stardust. Now we're getting messy.

Separately, these are all iconic, well-regarded works. But when you combine them all together in a big, bubbling celluloid cauldron, the resulting brew ends up smelling like it came from the Bog of Eternal Stench.

Setting aside the fact that it tried and failed to combine a handful of disparate influences, there's an even more basic, elemental bad idea at the heart of Labyrinth - casting leads who couldn't act.

Jennifer Connelly was 15 or 16 when this was made and only had a few lines in one or two other movies up to this point. She was gifted with physical beauty that would make a Greek god jealous, and therefore had an undeniable screen presence. But at this point in her life, she simply couldn't act. To play devil's advocate, she was mostly acting with puppets, babies, and green screens which would be difficult for anyone, but she was especially not cut out for it.

Later in life she *became* a pretty good actress. But she was not one when Labyrinth was made. Which is extremely unfortunate because she's playing the main character in a movie where the only other speaking lines come from animatronic puppets and David Bowie. The film needed a much stronger teen actress to carry it.

Bowie's on screen a bit less, and the same is true of him - a charismatic, talented guy in the music world but wasn't really up for playing a villainous Goblin King. He floats around the screen in his very David Bowie way but you never feel anyone's ever going to be in any real danger.

So you've got a messy, disjointed premise that doesn't make any sense and leads who can't act to save it. Is there anything good?

The goblins are fun. They're well designed and they have the hallmark mix of charm and eccentricity that you'd expect from Jim Henson. The special FX haven't aged well but they were top of the class in 1986. That's about it.

It's sort of hard to believe this achieved beloved movie cult status as the years have gone by. I suppose it's a testament to how well-executed the puppets are. But if you need more than some goofy, lovable puppet goblins to be entertained by a feature length film, you'll be really disappointed.

A short, taut, adept piece of horror film making. The opening scenes feel slightly askew from the rest of the movie, but they serve their purpose in establishing the priest figure as a man of sound mind and mostly rational thought (as much as a priest can be a man of logic anyway) which will later leave no ambiguity about whether this is a psychological thriller or a gothic horror thriller.

Beautifully shot, beautifully lit, and backed by an unsettling score. Seek it out if you're in the mood for a short but extremely compelling piece of 70s horror.

Poirot overall as a series doesn't have too many laugh out loud moments, but this episode has a few.

Some are the good kind: the scene where he asks the woman he's investigating to borrow two pennies is an excellent comedic setup

Some are the bad kind: the unintentionally hilarious "chase" scene at the end when the crime is solved

Overall one of the funnier episodes if you like a sensible chuckle with your whodunnits.

If you're like me, and you believe the best movies are the ones that feel more real than real life, American Honey is a perfect movie.

I've wondered through Motel 6 parking lots and met these people.

I've been in that van.

It's perfect. Watch it and experience what every film should strive to be.

I've somehow avoided seeing Meet Joe Black since it came out almost 25 years ago, having heard whispers of its poor quality. Last night found me couch-bound with a bad hangover and no internet connection, so I strapped myself in and watched it start to finish with an open mind in spite of its reputation when I saw it was on TV.

It's laugh-out-loud bad. It's as bad as everyone says and maybe even a little worse. It's so bad it feels like a movie Tommy Wiseau might have made if he had access to a real budget and Hollywood A-listers.

Where do I even start?

Brad Pitt doing Jamaican patois in *multiple* scenes that are meant to be touching and not screamingly funny? (I literally screamed out loud with laughter the first time he goes into it)

Claire Forlani's terrible, completely unrealistic acting? The audience is supposed to believe her character fell in love with a complete stranger over the course of a stilted, bizarre encounter at a coffee shop? And then fell out and back in love with him all over again when he shows up at her family dinner acting like he's had a frontal lobotomy? It's one of the least convincing love stories ever portrayed, and probably 75% of it falls on her shoulders.

Brad Pitt veering all over the place tonally with the character of Joe Black? One minute he's like a stoned version of Rainman, eating spoonfuls of peanut butter and interacting with people like he was raised by wolves, the next he's cracking jokes about the IRS and giving stern lectures on business ethics. It's extremely embarrassing to watch and I have to imagine he disowns this movie completely.

What else?

Jeffery Tambor looking like an alternate universe Dr. Phil, and uttering weird non sequiturs like, "I love little girls"

Marcia Gay Harden as the whiny, 2nd best daughter who just wants her father have a happy birthday despite the fact he's completely uninterested and obviously extremely distracted by all the crazy events happening in his life

It's all just so, so bad.

As other reviews have pointed out, this has no less than *6* people credited for its screenplay. You feel the "too many cooks in the kitchen" vibe very deeply and that this was no one's vision as it swerves around trying to wax poetic about love and death, failing to make us care about any of the characters along the way.

Anthony Hopkins gives this movie way more than it deserves, and the only moments of quality come from him.

The end result is a very, very bizarre and unintentionally hilarious movie in which most of the characters' interactions with each other feel extremely unnatural. Imagine what your own family's reaction would be if your elderly father brought home a bleach blonde stud who acted autistic and spent every waking minute with him, explaining none of it. Then compare it to this movie.

If someone gave Tommy Wiseau the directive to combine Ghost and It's a Wonderful Life, this would be the end result.

Watch it for a laugh.

A middling & predictable movie in just about every way. I feel like I've seen this movie 100 times under 100 different names with 100 slightly different tweaks.

Hugh Grant is the only redeeming thing about it. He's always watchable even in the most mediocre rom-coms he gets cast in, and this is no exception. Though I would say it is the *most* mediocre of everything he's been in. Chris Elliot & JK Simmons are completely wasted here. Marissa Tomei plays the same likeable, attractive, suburban mom she's played in 20 other movies since the start of the century.

It's like someone decided to remake Wonder Boys but strip out everything that made it interesting or gave it a soul. It's Wonder Boys for a consumer insight tested, mass market crowd.

In fact, if you're in the mood for a movie about a frustrated, washed-up writer professor who spends too much time on campus, you should just watch Wonder Boys instead.

One of the better episodes of QI. Worth watching for Gyles Brandreth's stories alone. (And kind of makes me wish there was a show dedicated to him telling insane anecdotes!)