Poor Raymond Carver

Rating: 1/10 (27 February 2015)

Still hard to believe this film received an Academy Award for best script. It looks more to have been written by 4 very green high school students inexperienced in life or the art of writing. They seem to have spent a lot of their time sitting around calling up favorite movie tropes & clichés. These somehow got misinterpreted as Magic Realism by a gullible press assisted along no doubt by a prominent product placement of Borges' Labyrinth in Ed Norton's hand in one of many stagy scenes.
Also in evidence as teenage over-enthusiasm is an excessive amount of misogyny. The women in this film come off as conniving, manipulative, neurotic & self-obsessed in the extreme with Emma Stone as the new Martha Plimpton. I wonder if Lindsay Duncan was aware before signing on of the grotesquely abusive & wholly gratuitous verbal intro her character received in the bar scene. The male characters fare somewhat better only because their humiliation comes in having to appear semi-nude, easily laughed off in macho culture.
Actually I think what Inarittu & his band have pulled off is to deliberately make a shallow pretentious pseudo-Indy film satirizing their counterparts of the north to which a major part of Jollywood elite have bought in whole hog.