hyped garbage

Best movie ever!

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Poorly cast movie Penelope Cruz comes across as a complete airheadShe is so superficial and unauthentic as can be this is Hollywood at its worstTotally self indulgentCruz has no on screen chemistry what so everThis was movie that had some potential but the direction in consort with the shallowness of Crus acting made it a wasteShe can't play a school girl at all it is laughable and a waste of timeHer character is completely affective dull and blandThere is no way the Kingsley character could find her attractive

It is basically an older man's fantasy of luring Penelope Cruz into bed using nothing more than his erudition and appreciation of culture. Our protagonist is a university writing professor and all around man of letters who does just that. At a full two hours of slow moving dialouge, this is not a film for the anxious. The sparse few good lines from the movie highlight the abundance of flat exchanges and use of the f-word. However, it is worth seeing for the performance of Cruz and of Dennis Hopper who is always interesting (somebody explain to me why he doesn't get more work and is reduced to doing mutual fund company commercials?

Despite good performances from the central characters this is a flawed and immature piece of work and it stems from the writing which is like one of Woody Allen's efforts at profound insight into life but without the jokes. The result is nothing more than a second rate adolescent chapbook of narcissistic reflections using other peoples ideas.The artistic quotes to establish his credentials: e.g. the Velasquez pictures were the sort of seduction trick a much younger man might have tried; the photography, the piano music; the awful aphorism about the superficiality of beauty were a set of attributes of a silly and pretentious work. It may have been necessary to have read some art history but nonetheless the main characters lived in a precious and self conscious world.Into this world Consuela's enters like a fetish object, almost capable of being a real person but not quite in the fantasy of the old man. The ending - improbable and not cruel enough - completed the mawkish tone of the work. Stripped of the college degree quotations this is a cheap story.

Philip Roth's writing, though fluid as always, has gotten repetitious and a little slapdash over the years. And since "Portnoy's Complaint" they've usually seemed vaguely autobiographical. If this story is equally self referential, no man can do anything but envy Roth and his character because, despite all the doubt and anguish, gets to have a decades-long affair with the foxy Patricia Clarkson and a shorter but still intense one with the incomparable Penelope Cruz.Ben Kingsley is the sophisticated professor of sorts who has an affair with Cruz. Cruz professes to love him but demands his trust when she's away from him. Kingsley is being torn apart by his attraction for Cruz, for Clarkson, and by his own guilt over the thirty-plus years of difference in age between him and Cruz. He's also, sensibly, I think, concerned that, whatever claims Cruz makes, she's interested in him because he is an authority figure who plays the piano and explains the paintings of Goya to her. She certainly seems sincere in her love for Kingsley, but can she be a closet groupie? It's handled delicately by the director, Isabel Coixet. There is absolutely nothing about it that's in your face. The points are made quietly and the story moves on. A recurring figure in Kingsley's life is Dennis Hopper as a long-married friend who shows up from time to time to help the aging prof and offer common-sense advice. Dennis Hopper, former infant terrible, owns the part. He's as good as he's ever been in a muted role.It's reminiscent of Paddy Chayevky's "Middle of the Night," except more fragile. It also reminds one of a Woody Allen movie, except without the interpolated one liners.Nice choice of simple piano or cello music as both source and overscore. A love story for adults. Nice job by all concerned.