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Reviews
Sisters (2015)
Just dreadful
This one is truly awful.
I'm not so sure when I've seen a movie that I disliked more. The only reason I didn't walk out within ten minutes was because I was with two other people. In the end, they hated it just as much as I. All of us, BTW, work in film and publishing. We saw the film at a WGA screening in Beverly Hills 12/27/15....
Where to begin? The characters are insipid. No one on the screen (I'm speaking here of the characters, not the actors) whom I/we could like. The language was self-consciously profane,meant to be funny but only repetitively offensive. The plot, a big party that destroys a family house, lowbrow and irrational. The more I watched these characters the more I disliked them, their friends and their families.
There's such a thing as a "smart dumb comedy" (e.g., The Wedding Crashers, but this was not it.
Toward the end of the film there is a massive sinkhole on the family property. If only this whole project had gone down there. Works like this are the problem with the American film industry. They seek the lowest element of audience stupidity and occasionally, as in this case, achieve it.
To be AVOIDED! A mess!
Irrational Man (2015)
Borderline repulsive
I'm a longtime Woody Allen fan and really disliked this movie. Yeah, Emma's cute and the film is well directed and pretty to look at. But the central character and central theme are loathsome. Worse, even if this is supposed to be Brown University or some Ivy institution, the students depicted here bear no semblance to the real thing. Nobody gets that excited about a philosophy professor these days. And the whole philosophical discussion was b.s. and boring. When Woody does romantic comedies, they're still pretty good. When he goes dark with philosophical overtones, it's pretension crap.
Joaquin Phoenix, paunchy and overwrought was essentially an obnoxious drunk. Emma Stone (the only thing good about this movie) as a cute as she could be, dressed alluringly in short shorts almost the entire time. The rest of the students looked like a Ralph Lauren ad. Nor did they talk like real 20 year old students. Was there any reason to like any of these people. Not that I could see. And the ending was just too pat and the voice overs were downright irritating after a while.
Opinions will vary, but this was one I would have been better off missing.