The Worst Film Ever

hyped garbage

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Just something to keep the audience watching, I found this movie lacking in the True to Life column. Bale- as the academically successful son of a mother who may have not been the best rolemodel for someone aspiring to be very detail oriented and on schedule. Bale- who can intervene when another parent is being too harsh/uncaring about their child, but cannot help but attack his mother for her faults. Bekinsale- who her life behind to follow her fiancée in his quest for a better education, yet allows drugs/bad-boy image to draw her away from her love and career a bit too easily. Bunk! Saving grace: the mom played very true to life. (singing by bad boy band lead is not worth a jukebox dime)

the virtue of movie - the cast. Frances Mc Dormand,Christian Bale, Natascha McElhone. ball of situations, crumbs of humor, slices of Californian life style and music industry. heart - self definition out of others but as product of them. axis - character of Chistian Bale - scale of facts, words and strange world who gives measure of life. story is not original but solution is special. the pool is, in this case, not only a scene but one character, refuge, root, piece of unfinished relationship and kind of solitude. a good film but in strange form. ball of neurosis and fragile escapes, love as mist and place of the other in your existence, its end is just beginning. That is all !

If you were privy to the Laurel Canyon lifestyle in the 60s and 70s, this film is like a retro shock with all the old familiar haunts still there, and the inevitable lost generation of 20 somethings wandering the deer trail lanes of traffic to hang with the musicians. At least, this is how the premise of the 2002 version of the canyon lifestyle is reflected. Between the generation of hippie organic mama (Frances McDormand) and her predictably uptight conservative doctor son (Christian Bale) and his uber egghead grad student girlfriend (Kate Beckinsale) are the silences of a parent who did her thing and a son who didn't. Literally caught between them is the luscious Beckinsale, who comes to enjoy the hedonism the mother's world of music and a young lover (Allessando Nivola) present. She likes the pot, pool parties, and 3-somes while her fiancé dallies with the sublimated lust for a professional colleague (Natasha McElhone) who is more his cup of straight-laced tea. His resentment of mom's ability to be cool and productive clash with his inability to make decisions about his own lifestyle choices, a serious wife-in-training, his medical practice, and the possibility of affairs with other women. He is as much drawn to sin and swinging as Kate. The tension of the six characters makes the story of kids and their parents failure to communicate as old as the perennial hills. Great soundtrack with vocals by Nivola and recording sessions are added plus. McDormand is one of the finest character actors around, and she rises to the challenge of taking back seat to Beckinsale's beauty. Nevertheless, McDormand steals the show every time she is on screen. We don't care about the young couple, we care about the three-way between mother, her lover, and her son's lover...that's Hollywood!

A Hollywood touchy-feely movie that has all the subtlety of a lead rock. It doesn't take much to soon figure where this movie is taking the audience. The sexual threesomes or foursomes or twosomes or whatever soon dominate the story as the audience is asked to accept a whole range of implausibilities in order for the story to work. The mother, the son, the girl-friend, the musician, all clichés, all unbelievable, all annoying, most of all the son, played by Christian Bale, in a glaring example of miscasting that is egregious, even for a Hollywood movie, which is saying a lot. The setting itself is contrived, as if Laurel Canyon is some kind of stage, a place that's so special. C'mon! It's L.A. Nothing special about that. It's not even Hollywood. Nothing in this movie works accept the final scene where the two main male characters get into a fight. Only then does the movie come to life. This movie is further proof that Hollywood should stay away from the touchy-feely stuff and stick to what it does best - producing c-g action pictures with cartoon-like characters. After all, isn't that what the public wants?