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Let's be honest, this is about as close to an unfilmable property as it gets. Between the vast array of budget-busting concepts, characters and settings, the niche-settled sense of humor (granted, it's a rather large niche, but a niche all the same) and Douglas Adams's inimitably flirty, hilarious knack for description, it's a wonder this was even filmed because it seems so perfectly suited to a non-visual medium. But it's a popular title and Hollywood's long since run out of fresh, moneymaking ideas, so after two-plus decades in development hell, somebody finally gave it a green light. And, god bless it, the thing actually performs admirably well in a number of unexpected ways.
For starters, the visual design is a raging success. A creative wet dream, it's positively teeming with expertly-realized concepts. The dozens of alien races look magnificent, the competing spacecraft are wildly varied and thoroughly interesting, the guide itself is a note-perfect modernization of an aging concept, and the infamous factory on Magrathea is jaw-droppingly realized. The casting is deeply inspired, too, with Alan Rickman, Sam Rockford, Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel seemingly born to play their roles as Marvin, Zaphod, Arthur and Trillian, respectively.
The only snag lies in the story, which is half-baked at best, cripplingly over-ambitious at worst and even occasionally, inexcusably, dull. Too often it stretches too thin, striving to please everyone and instead falling universally short. The bare threads of Adams's original storyline are still there, plain as day, and they still work excellently. But they're back-seated by far too many indulgent side treks and wink-nod-grins for anyone's good. It's a commendable effort that does an awful lot right - far more than I was prepared to accept - but can't quite get over the hump into unbridled success.
I went for the laughs and left the movie theater with an existential crisis. I loved it <3
if you got a choice between carrying my giant dead ass or being filthy rich.. please..by all means..take the fucking money bro
Powerful, moving and precise, this documentary is a must view.
VIP5This just about brought a tear to my eye. Never before seen footage watching everything unfold right before your eyes.
I thought this was just another lesbian light-drama, with some cute shit, a little crying and a happy ending... Jesus! I was so completely wrong and now I'm WRECKED!
This film is on a whole new level of pain, angst and cruelty. Congratulations to Mélanie Laurent. She really fucking did it!
#NotMyRodrick We need the old Rodrick back
While I appreciate the cinematography, and the imagery can be impressive, and the score, the movie(?) seems to be abstract solely to be abstract. It never seems to have a point, or produce a real plot.
Overrated. Nothing was thrilling to watch. Even scenes that should have been suspenseful or exciting had no impact. The dad dies. Who cares? The relationship seemed empty. There should have been a gold mine of interesting ideas there. None. Holly had a voice over where she is poetic, yet in the movie the most poetic she gets its saying 'I found a dead chicken this morning.' Total mismatch. The voice over was contrived to try and give some meaning. Maybe the person who made the movie concluded how empty it was, and this was his solution to inject some life? The characters weren't fleshed out enough to make us understand their actions or care. It seemed the story telling didn't have the viewer in mind. It looks nice though.
Well... Considering I've read the books and really enjoyed the first ones I have to say that I am pretty darn disappointed. Found the movie rather plain and the actors just didn't make me care.
...and since I know there are plenty of books to come it was very obvious that this probably isn't the last Vampire Academy film. It should be, though.
VIP9[9.5/10] The most ingenious choice that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women makes is to chop up the story so as to juxtapose present and past. It not only immediately marks this adaptation as distinct from its predecessors, but helps to recontextualize and connect different parts of the story to make it feel new again.
The audience has a chance to meet and appreciate Freidrich before Laurie has burrowed into their hearts. By the same token, the joy and connection between Amy and Laurie can be front and center from the get-go, without springing it on the viewer halfway through the story. And the bookend approach allows Gerwig to put Jo’s drive and travails as a writer into the spotlight early.
But the biggest advantage it confers on the film is how it allows Little Women to constantly contrast the lives that these young girls imagined they would lead one day, with the lives each finds themselves inhabiting in the future. Like the novel it’s based on, Gerwig’s adaptation is anchored squarely around considering the wildest dreams of its titular set of sisters, and measuring them against the paths actually available to women in their time, and the places their choices and passions take them. The jumps back and forth and time allow Gerwig to check expectation with reality, to trace cause and effect, and to resolve the two with poignance and grace.
It also allows Gerwig and company to flesh out each of the young women at the center of the narrative. Jo March still commands the story and the screen. Saoirse Ronan throws herself into the role, conveying all the punch, heedlessness, and subtle vulnerabilities of the character with endearing abandon. It is both a dream role and a hard one, but Ronan makes it look effortless.
And yet, this adaptation makes time for the other March sisters to falter and flourish. Amy is vivid and real from the jump, with her questioning of her own talents, her sense of being second to Jo, and her truth-telling relationship with Laurie put front and center. Meg’s chance at a life of elegance and plenty, the love that pulls her away from it, and the joys and hardships of that choice are given time to breathe. And Beth remains the heart of the film -- still a little too pure for this world, but one who suffers for her own goodness, reminds a kindly neighbor of what’s been lost, and spurs her sister to take up what she’s put down.
All the while, Little Women is utterly gorgeous to look at through the March Sisters’ misadventures. Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux capture the bucolic beauty of scene after scene draped in New England splendor. The pair construct tableaus of faraway elegance and local beauty in turn. But these visuals aren’t gratuitous. Beyond making the movie a treat to watch, it helps sell the contrast at the heart of the film. Scenes set in Jo’s youth have a golden hue, an inviting glow that conveys the idyllic, hopeful tone of those early days. And the ones set in her adulthood are darker and starker, visually communicating the various cold realities the March family has had to grapple with in later years.
As necessary as it is to contend with those cold realities, it’s just plain fun to vicariously share in the joy that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with their mother and friends in their family home. Apart from its structural choices, apart from its character focus, the greatest strength of Gerwig’s Little Women is how well it captures this sense of young people at play, of a headstrong young woman in their element, and that unfathomable, spontaneous vigor of youth.
The March Sisters, and their friends and close confidants, fight and babble and hug and exalt together. There’s a move toward Gilmore-esque speed and overlap in conversation after conversation, expressing the happy chaos that envelops these lives. This story is founded on the breadth of possibility forged in such a simple, familiar environment, on the pleasures and satisfactions found despite absences and meager means, on blessings shared and passed around. The warmth of the March household would not work if those who orbit and inhabit it, did not seem so real in their rough-and-tumble interactions and simple joys.
Those joys, however, are meant to run up against the expectations of adulthood that clash with allowances of youth. That’s the role Aunt March plays -- the naysayer to the slack existence her brother and his wife and children have made for each other. But Gerwig does not make her a villain. Instead, she is merely practical, a woman who knows from her own experiences which choices are permitted and which invite difficulties, delivered with an amusing wryness that makes her endearing even as she aims to stifle her nieces’ dreams.
That’s the crux of Gerwig’s adaptation. The March sisters imagine wondrous lives for one another, borne on the backs of each’s great talent. Jo pictures herself as a bold writer in the big city who never marries anything but her art. Meg sees glimpses of a life where she’ll never have to work, where there’s time for things like acting and society and beautiful dresses. Amy envisions the life of the genius painter overseas who stands with giants. And each finds those dreams running aground on the many limitations of the real world, with tethers made extra taut for the declaratively fairer sex.
All except for Beth, whose dreams lie in the simple doing of good, the making of music for those around to hear it rather than for the masses, despite her prodigious abilities. She is the cinch of Little Women, not merely in her death which brings the March sister home. But in her life of quiet kindness at home, in her peace with what must come and the joy to be found despite it, a joy they found together in the attic and can still share and revive no matter how big or little they are now.
Jo, Amy, and Meg each regains a measure of that golden glow in the shadow of the house they grew up in. Amy loses the artists life in Paris she imagines, but finds happiness in a partner who vindicates her talents and for whom love triumphs over station. Meg is denied by circumstance of the beautiful things and easy life she once pictured, but is buoyed by the care and satisfaction of family and a life built with the man she loves. Even Jo turns away from the “spicy” stories that sell to stuffy cigar-smoking New York publishers and finds her truth, finds her greatness, in the bonds fraught and familiar at home, with a winking-but-joyous connection to a beau of her own. And each is seen sharing the fruits of their talents, passing them on to a new generation of young men and women.
There’s a degree of wish-fulfillment to the close of the film, a heartstring-tugging image of familial warmth in a bucolic setting. But Gerwig earns that warmth. The happiness crafted in a humble home is measured against the metes and bounds of the wider world, and found no less worthy. The choices afforded to women of any station at the time are reckoned with and suffered in, with the ensuing joys and small, self-possessed rebellions made more potent in that unfair crucible. The losses each suffers, the distance between the lives they dreamed and the lives they live, is laid bare in the cuts between past and present.
But in the end, Gerwig does as Alcott did, and makes the fulfillment each chooses meaningful by those terms. The hardships great and small each endures, make it more than a publisher-mandated happy ending when, despite that difference between past imagination and present truth, each of these little women realizes they’re living the lives they truly want.
A woman was actually raped during the shooting of this movie, in a sort of ~artistic plot~ between the director and the actor who did it. It went public, you can even see interviews about it. I don't give a rats ass about your art, they should have been in jail for that. Also, none of the involved deserve to be prestiged so yeah, all that hype about Bertolucci does not stick with me.
This is a really fantastic film, so glad I watched it. In my top 5 of all time.
See this movie! It's clever. It has the unexpected. It's funny (but it is a dry, clever wit, and although I was sitting there chuckling away, a lot of the audience were missing a lot of the quick witted humour). The women gave excellent performances. The plot had a B line that isn't revealed until later, so pay attention. I give this film an 8 (appropriately so, and great) out of 10. [Heist film]
this was so bloody good i think i ascended onto a higher plane
VIP12Wow. This was a lot better than what I was expecting. It's not the greatest movie ever, but a ton of fun for sure, and brings back a good amount of the charm of the original movie. Blows the sequels out of the water for sure.
VIP8It's a fine movie but nothing special. It is entertaining and the all star cast is a lot of fun. I love Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway. The heist was ok but it felt like it could of been bigger and done better. I don't get all the hate on an all female cast. It's fun to see something different and I would rather have this than an Ocean's 14. I would watch an Ocean's 9 and 10.
Fun and entertaining movie that left me with a smile. Anne Hathaway absolutely knocks it out of the park in the film and is the best thing in the film. This movie makes for a good addition to the Ocean's franchise.
The funniest movie of all the funny movies. My stomach hurt from laughing. Ready to partey.
Excellent movie, way better than what I expected.
I really enjoyed it, and I agree, Kristen Wiig is awesome.
I did not expect all too much from this movie and bought the BluRay mainly because of all the good things I kept on reading about it. But boy, was I in for a surprise: the story is told in a saracastic way and with some very black humour, but at the some time with so much emotions that I just have to love it.
The characters (from the drug addict grand father, over the overworked mother, the suicidal uncle and the mute-by-choice teenage son to the jobless father, who tries to get a new career as a motivational speaker started) are absolutely hilarious, the criticism on kid beauty contests as one example of what is wrong with this world and its beauty mania very pointed and the plot so entertaining that I just regret not having watched this comedy earlier.
Potentially my favourite princess movie! Nobody could ever play Giselle like Amy Adams, she is utterly perfect! I totally relate to Giselle, as in real life I literally burst out into princess singing and dancing all the time! This movie is so much fun! I could watch it over and over. The characters are so lovable, the songs are so catchy and it is so light-hearted <3
I can't wait for this movie to finally launch!
And even if it's worse than expected, the soundtrack surely won't disappoint.
UPDATE: I saw a movie so beautiful I started crying™
Stop rating movies before you even know they are in production!!!
I really liked this movie.
This was fun. For once Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3) made a movie not set around Christmas time as well lol.
this could have been good but was filled with so many cheap feels.
Hahah I liked this! The characters are likeable, and from a virgins perspective, this was a very enjoyable haha. Makes you think about what we put into sex in our society these days. We make it out to be this "big thing", but it surely doesn't have to be xD
Ahhh. Good movie.
I am a huge fan of Louis and the work he has done throughout the years. His films are often incisive and enjoyable to watch. His bumbling persona belies a sharp mind. He had a tough nut to crack here. The Church of Scientology is notoriously closed off to outsiders and Louis struggled to get in to interview current members of the church. Still, he provides a great documentary using the insights of ex-members to bring to light some of the alleged practices of the church.
The church typically complained about what Louis was doing; If they had let him into the church to meet active members then they would have had a better opportunity to show themselves in a better light. As it is, their constant belittling of ex-members and antagonism towards Louis shows them for who they possibly really are. All documentary makers who have tried to discover more about the church have been forced into a one-sided approach because the 'other' side have been closed off and negative.
