Picked this one blindfolded (although I realized later I had seen the trailer, which made it look cloyingly awful), and it was something of a surprise. Parts of it WERE cloyingly awful, but in spite of that I found it to be an insightful, poetic and fairly original film with moments of great writing, good performances, and some of the better suburban cinematography I’ve seen in a long time.
i read the book when it came out and all i could think while reading it was this is the most BLATANT movie treatment as novel that i have ever read. i was casting the whole thing as i was reading. so shameless. why he didn’t just write a screenplay in the first place is beyond me.
I hadn’t been aware of the book, but the movie makes use of a lot of voice over narration that heavily suggests adapatation from a book. The narration was used fairly well though, although it sometimes spelled out the obvious.
i will watch it on video. definitely. mostly cuz my fucking lord and friggin’ saviour is in it:
god, if only him and linda manz had had a baby and called it jesus i would finally have a cult worth joining.
He was teh good.
Scott, does the book adequately explain why Sarah is married to her husband in the first place? Because this seemed to be the most glaring flaw in the whole film.
eh, i can barely remember. i think he wrote it like they were just your average disconnected married couple headed for divorce.
guy at work keeps asking me every 3 days if i’ve seen this yet. which makes me kind of not want to see it. especially since “in the bedroom” annoyed me. (totally seemed like the kind of movie todd field’s character from “ruby in paradise” would make.)
There were plenty of things wrong with it, but they were unfortunately the type of flaws I’ve so come to expect in American indie films that I’m happy whenever a film is good in spite of them: people being too pretty for their characters, over-explanation, a need for every scene to be rich with “meaning” and for characters to spew truisms about “life” and “human beings.”
the type of flaws I’ve so come to expect in American indie films
Produced by New Line Cinema, the same “indie” that brought you The Lord of the Rings. I notice that people under 30 now use the term for any film that isn’t about a superhero.
I read the novel (OK) too and consider it a bad sign that the film is 135 minutes long; ridiculous. (And also that Field’s first film, In the Bedroom, was a revenge movie for NPR listeners.)
Arguably, all of Tom Perrotta’s books—Election, The Wishbones, Joe College, Bad Haircut—read like screenplays, but they’re all massively entertaining (and in the case of the bookending two mentioned, slip into greatness.
i loved the skateboarding parts, also loved that bad news bears child molester
I forgot about The Wishbones! I read that too.
Produced by New Line Cinema, the same “indie” that brought you The Lord of the Rings. I notice that people under 30 now use the term for any film that isn’t about a superhero.
Guilty of thoughtless usage there. I really just mean “pictures marketed to affluent blue-staters.”
I would’ve never known this was from a book written by the Election guy.
Election the novel isn’t as callous or cynical as the Payne film.
i really liked in the bedroom, and loved this, Field is soon becoming a cinematic updike
well there’s an author I can cross off my “to read” list
(maybe two.)
(oh, who am I kidding? I don’t read fiction anymore.)
you read ilx
Flawed, but on the whole pretty good. Hurting OTM about the suburban cinematography. I suspect that if I saw this again though, I probably wouldn’t like it as much.
Bonus points for getting the PBS Frontline narrator to do the voice-overs.
I especially liked the pool scene
Just saw this today and I was impressed, by the sheer competence of the film making, by the performances (particularly Winslet), and by the subtext running contrary to that of your typical Hollywood film; no, you can’t always follow your dreams and be impulsive, a lot of being grown-up and living in the real world is about compromise and self-control.
“sheer competence”
!
What’s wrong with that?
Most of the time I look at Armond White (I don’t even know if he wrote about this movie or not) and say “no, it’s not possible for someone to so frequently be against the grain of popular opinion.” And then movies like this come along and remind me that, yes, it’s possible to be the only one who hates something everyone else loves.
This movie sucks shit.
oh yeah, the voiceover was the best part!
I didn’t hate it at all, but I was somewhat confused when I heard an interview with Todd Field afterwards, just at how carefully the film had obviously been made, in ways that left little impression on me. I feel a similar way when I read obviously intelligent, sensitive people gushing over it.
The voiceover, I didn’t like, for similar reasons to the reasons I didn’t like the Desperate Housewives one.
The paedophile’s performance was excellent, and I loved reading of the kind of obscurity that the actor was rescued from by Field. And [SPOILER ALERT] I did like that it steered a surprising course with his fate and recidivism. The date scene was very powerful. But ultimately, I didn’t feel his story meshed satisfactorily with that of the other characters. I had the feeling that it might have made more sense in the novel. And the story of the jock hounding him because of his own demons felt a bit of a blunt tool.
the narration was total WTF, caught between irony and sincerity. (sorry cutty) otherwise I already forget the rest of the movie.
“sheer competence” feels like damning w/faint praise, tho obv wasn’t intended as such. a step above adequate I suppose
in fact I thought the film’s reliance on narration to advance plot points & flesh out characters was extremely lazy screen-writing.
show don’t tell FFS