And you get an uneven script, uneven direction, uneven acting, uneven you name it. There are little flashes of quality, but they're too short and too few.
The framework of family members gathering for an upcoming gay commitment ceremony presents a grab bag of themes and story lines, some connected, some not. Like another reviewer here, I really wasn't entirely sure about the dead baby. Or were there two? And what did that have to do with anything except the insensitivity of scheduling the ceremony on the anniversary of a child's death? I'm not giving anything away here--that's revealed pretty early on.
This movie does aspire to the Altmanesque, but the material doesn't warrant that approach. In fact, it does a disservice to the various story elements, some of which I couldn't make any sense of. Everything in an Altman movie has a reason for being there. There was no reason in this movie, for example, to have a motor-mouth "humorous" caterer. It didn't add anything--certainly not comic relief. It was just annoying.
There was a lot about this movie that was annoying. Ironically, the actress who played an actress was the worst actor in the movie. Most of the others were just passable, but, admittedly they didn't have a lot to work with. The director plays a surgeon who seems to have devolved into insanity, but an insanity that is not just unconvincing, it's just plain silly. The pre-ceremony argument of the couple didn't ring true either.
Every once in a great while I'd hear a good bit of dialog, or think that a plot point was interesting. But that happened rarely, certainly not enough to recommend this film.
The framework of family members gathering for an upcoming gay commitment ceremony presents a grab bag of themes and story lines, some connected, some not. Like another reviewer here, I really wasn't entirely sure about the dead baby. Or were there two? And what did that have to do with anything except the insensitivity of scheduling the ceremony on the anniversary of a child's death? I'm not giving anything away here--that's revealed pretty early on.
This movie does aspire to the Altmanesque, but the material doesn't warrant that approach. In fact, it does a disservice to the various story elements, some of which I couldn't make any sense of. Everything in an Altman movie has a reason for being there. There was no reason in this movie, for example, to have a motor-mouth "humorous" caterer. It didn't add anything--certainly not comic relief. It was just annoying.
There was a lot about this movie that was annoying. Ironically, the actress who played an actress was the worst actor in the movie. Most of the others were just passable, but, admittedly they didn't have a lot to work with. The director plays a surgeon who seems to have devolved into insanity, but an insanity that is not just unconvincing, it's just plain silly. The pre-ceremony argument of the couple didn't ring true either.
Every once in a great while I'd hear a good bit of dialog, or think that a plot point was interesting. But that happened rarely, certainly not enough to recommend this film.