I'll tell you why so serious

hyped garbage

Fantastic!

A Masterpiece!

I'm very surprised that it's described as a "drama" in the ... place from which I downloaded it (I forget whether we're allowed to mention these places by name - the red envelope place, please). Anyway, it's definitely more a comedy/satire than a drama and as such it's rather heavy handed and obvious. Still it's somewhat amusing. Whether you liked it or not, if you even got through it I would recommend you check out, for something similar but much much better all around, Alan Rudolph's "Choose Me" which is actually one of my favorite movies both for its style and substance.Oh, and I will say some of the editing choices in this film really left me scratching my head and wondering whether they were desperate attempts to gloss over little accidents of some sort in the shooting or just kind of bad editing/montagerie.The acting was good in general Rachel Rosenthal was almost too real! Brava!

"The New Age" is half fascinating and half dull. It's very much a comedy, albeit a very dark and satirical one. But it's emotionally distant, and has the distinct sense of being a film about rich people made for and by other rich people. It's about a world with a built-in sense of the ridiculous in the everyday, so much so that it's hard to know what's meant to make us laugh and what's designed to reflect real life. The leads are good. Peter Weller and Judy Davis disappear into their characters, Davis to the point I really didn't recognize her. The best and most entertaining part of the film is Samuel L. Jackson's cameo, and the scenes directly relating to it.Michael Tolkin's script has a lot of depth, but his direction doesn't. He films what happens, but without any real understanding of how to stage it. "The New Age" is a visually flat film, and looks like just about every average film from 1994. Which is to say, pretty dull. But, in the end, the script lifts the film up enough to be interesting in passing. I don't regret having seen this.

This movie sux so bad! I feel for the actors in it, because if I would've been in it, I couldn't help but fall asleep probably! This movie is so pitiful, I don't even know how I finished it. I rented it because I like Bruce Ramsay, but even he didn't save it 4 me. Don't rent it!!!!!

Critics seem to have split widely on this film, and it's easy to see why. It's a rather painful, plodding thing to sit through--yet one can't get it out of the mind afterward. Writer/director Tolkin has a lot of disturbing things to say about post-industrial affluence in America in the 1990s, and in trying to say everything in one movie he has piled it on so thick that the brain requires a postmortem to reflect. Judy Davis, as she was in "Husbands and Wives," is dynamite, and the film is worth seeing just for her. The film has an uncanny eye and feel for the bleak interiors of the contemporary American service economy: the boutiques, the high-rise telemarketing boiler rooms, the house-poor interiors of career people who are hardly ever at home, etc. The film's title refers to the spiritual quest of the couple to find a meaning to their existence, or at least some alternative approach to life to their destructive materialism. How they go about it is all wrong, of course. In true hedonist fashion, they try everything. At the same time they seek a simpler, spiritual, non-materialistic life via a bunch of wacky gurus and cultists, they are indulging in carnal and other pleasures as diversions. When they open a small business, ostensibly to gain more control over their lives and income, the forces of the world are worse than any bosses. In all of this, they seem to be outside of everything they do, as in dreams when you watch yourself and are powerless to control the changing scenery. Despite their doldrums and hostility, this is a couple who have too much in common to split. During the course of all this, Tolkin gets plenty of jabs in about an American economy that seems to be teetering on wisps of hope rather than on any true productivity. By the end, the "new age" looks uncomfortably like a very old one, in which the law of the jungle reigned.