December 30, 2008

Film Critic Quote of the Week

Sean Burns of Philadelphia Weekly, on "Revolutionary Road":

Did you ever hear the one about how beneath those postcard-perfect shiny surfaces, the suburbs are actually barren wastelands of dysfunction? Oh, yeah—everybody’s heard that one...

But here we go again anyway, and what separates Revolutionary Road from those other flicks is its complete absence of humor, characterization or story. Kate and Leo just stand around shouting the subtext at one another...

Revolutionary Road might work best as a sick joke, aimed at couples who went to see Titanic on a first date and now find themselves married and as miserable as Frank and April Wheeler. Otherwise, I can’t imagine any reason for it to exist.

Oh, it's so much worse than that. The movie has one idea- that the suburbs are stifling and constraining- and hammers it constantly for two hours.

At the screening tonight, I'm convinced that 50 percent of the people who showed up only came because they heard Kate Winslet has a new movie that's filled with nude scenes, only they confused 'Road' with "The Reader."

One highlight though- during what's meant to be the film's most emotionally wrenching moment, a woman's cell phone rang. Except it didn't just ring- her particular ring consisted of a Cookie Monster-like voice yelling "Ring ring," several times in rapid succession, followed by a loud scream.

Normally, I don't have much of a tolerance for that sort of thing. But this particular ring, at that particular moment of that particular movie- I couldn't stop laughing for the rest of the movie and for about 10 minutes afterward.

Posted by Stephen Silver at December 30, 2008 11:15 PM
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