movie review - the good girl

[brad]

its good. one scene especially i really liked i'll post sepereate to not spoil it if u havent seen.

more like a foreign film, slow paced and no action but real good. a human interest film i guess.

[brad]

spoiler kinda of

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so hubbie finds out shes [censored] around and he says is the baby mine? (and it cant be hospital says hes sterile) and she says deadpan yes it is im sure. then he asks who she [censored] and she says it doesnt matter, he names wrong guy (who she doesnt like) and she goes yes. heh. (confirms my theory of if someone asks a closed question , eg, is it him?, and you say yes you will always be believed.

ok hey i liked it.

[Dynasty]

I thought Aniston was a little too depressing in the movie. But, it was nice to see she could carry a film rather than just being the girlfriend/wife of the actor carrying the film.

The ending was a bit bizarre. It seems every movie about infidelity has to have an "out-of-nowhere" ending. Just last night, I watched "Unfaithful" with Richard Gere and that ended with a murder from a totally normal and well-adjusted character.

Do all infidelities end with crimes like murder and robbery?

[KJS]

Dynasty,

I couldn't agree more. I think what you speak of us a trend that is contributing greatly to the (deserved) bad reputation of Hollywood films. I think its due to lazy writing.

It seems the pattern goes like this: I have told a story, but I want it to pack an emotional punch at the end. What can I do to get the reaction I want? I know, I'll have someone get killed, because death (especially murder) is something everyone fears (and reviles, in the case of murder) so my audience will be moved.

So, instead of writing something that people can emotionally identify with, which I would contend elicits empathy and even greater emotion, screenwriters (and many novelists), choose to write scenes of murder, something very few people ever actually deal with in real life. The result is a lessened, more knee jerk "that is a really bad thing" reaction, instead of a more realistic "I feel for that person" reaction that would come from an ending where someone bottoms out without killing or being killed, as usually happens in real life.

I think the best evidence for this is Boogie Nights. The first 1/3 to 1/2 that films was excellent, IMO. Once they started spilling blood to (over)emphasize the guy's downward spiral, the whole thing went to the dogs. Not everyone who has an emotional breakdown resorts to crime and murder, but screenwriters seem to think they do, or at least have not developed an arsenal that allows for the depiction of tragedy without killing these days.

This trend is explored very well in the film Adaptation by Spike Jonze, written by the Donald Kaufmann, who wrote Jones' Being John Malkovich.

KJS