IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

michaeljayallen It's supposed to be a realistic-ish adult movie, filmed in real Manhattan locations like the Film Forum. It has a kind of flatly realistic tone. But it came out in 2007 and Nora and her friends all smoke ALL THE TIME like it's 1965 without bothering to go outside. She wears silk dresses all of the time, of varying lengths including really short, one after another. Then suddenly she's got longish denim cutoffs on. But of course with a loose ballet style top. She has emotional breakdowns all the time in public. She's having dinner with some guy and her married couple friends and she acts like a 13 year old who doesn't want to be there. She walks out of her job in an emotional huff, again like a 13 year old, not a 30 something. New York (and Sarah Lawrence graduates everywhere) 30 somethings have learned how to hide everything. She just seems more high maintenance needy than anything else.Her and her friend ask the Paris cabbie to find a nice but cheap hotel. He delivers them to a place where the room is plain but looks newly done and is roomy for a big city, has a HVAC system, and everything is color and pattern coordinated. They sneer. There's a hair dryer on the wall and they go to bed with towels on their heads. She wears all kinds of different outfits in Paris and doesn't really have any luggage, just two small to medium sized bags.SPOILER ALERT (although these points were mentioned in media reviews)All very not-normal for NYC and Paris in 2007. Then of course the obligatory not being able to figure out a way to get a phone number, for a person who is a professional high end fixer as Roger Ebert wrote about. Actually she doesn't even try. And then she acts oddly distant when she (one in a million chance) runs into the guy on the Metro.So it's not just like Roger said that there's suddenly a plot point necessitated unrealistic problem, but that the unrealisticisms run throughout a film trying to be realish.If it comes up on your local PBS station, what the heck, maybe watch it. I did. It was oddly completely washed out and I had to adjust everything to abnormal values to get it to look halfway decent, but who knows whose fault that was.

piry12 In the beginning Nora looks at her face in the mirror with tremendous sadness, trying to get ready to smile out there.Later we see a a not very convinced Drea de Matteo listening to her husband's speech about love and marriage. Both of them (Nora and her friend) take medications (I don't think this is a coincidence in the movie) maybe Prozac? But nothing is solved, just like in real life, you live with your problems day after day.Nora complains that she doesn't have luck with men but with Melvin she started complicating things for no reason and freaking out for the wrong reasons too. His face reflects awe when he witness so much unexpected drama. (the incident in the bakery is a good example) Is it random that he is French and she is American? I would like to think so.The yoga, the pills, the drinking to relax, the thinking that sleeping with someone the first night will influence the outcome of a relationship, are all interesting and common events/thoughts that don't really make their lives better. One is married and the other one is not but yet, they are suffering. And this suffering, it seems to me that the movie suggests it, is not only related to the men, but to something withing themselves.

robbierobinson Honest to God, halfway through B.E. I thought, "This director has watched too many John Cass. movies." I did not know his daughter directed it until I looked at the box. Lots of scenes with only one or two people on screen does not necessarily make drama. Nora was annoying, not sympathetic,and did not make an ideal victim. You don't get a Purple Heart for self-inflicted wounds. Was that supposed to be an arty ending? I was just glad it was over. On a positive note, I gotta give Zoe C. credit for doing something that was arguably a little risky, although it seemed tailored for film-fest crowd. I went out with a woman like Nora a few times, until I realized she was boring and an emotional black hole. In B.E.II, he dumps her after 2 weeks and swears never to go out with an American woman again.

TinyPliny This is a very depressing movie. I am not sure why it has been billed as a comedy. The lead actress stumbles and grimaces through a misguided haze of cigarette smoke, alcohol and a couple of boyfriends before she arrives at a similar chain-smoking and alcoholic Frenchman. An interminably boring and totally inexplicable courtship follows before the inevitable chasing-across-the-countries-and-getting-united plot.It is the same old tired storyline bottled in a cracked old beer bottle. There is not a scene in a movie where the actor/actresses/extras aren't drinking or smoking. You would think that the same old tried and tested plot would elicit some happiness in the audience, but NO. The whole cast and the director manage to "skillfully" derail even the tired formula for happiness into a depressing, poorly acted, bitter and direction-less rut.Please don't waste your two hours watching this excuse for a "comedy". I think it should be a crime to make such ridiculously dull tripe. Portraying the two main agents of chronic disease (smoking and alcohol) in superfluous detail doesn't redeem this load of rubbish, any. Yuck.