Most Overrated Film of the Last 20 Years

Rating: 3/10 (15 April 2010)

I'm only giving this movie 3 stars for the pretty good night photography, but I've seen better night photography in TV movies made for Lifetime. If the director's last name had been Smith or Jones--and she was no relation to a famous director--who himself rides on his past reputation now, and hasn't made a good movie in years--we would have been spared this piece of self-indulgent, self-satisfied, and smug tripe. Mr Murray's character is supposed to be a former action movie star, the sort of actor who would have played sophisticated action heroes, such as James Bond. If you can buy that premise, your suspension of disbelief is strong enough to support the Golden Gate Bridge. And Scarlett's character is sooooo lonely, as her hot shot photographer boyfriend doesn't appreciate how good she looks in her underwear. Well, he's been there, seen that, right? Perhaps he has come to realize she's a brainless cipher who has nothing beneath her pretty surface but terminal self-pity, and an odd, brooding desire to sit semi-nude in hotel windows. So here comes the pitiful, sad sack, so-called action hero actor, equally depressed by his own self-awareness. And of course they bond in that Hollywood old guy young babe way, which makes me wonder if every Hollywood movie is now required to be partially a biography of Jack Nicholson. This film reminds me of a cartoon in the current issue of the New Yorker. In this cartoon three robots are shown sitting in front of typewriters, typing furiously. Two lab coat wearing researchers are standing behind the robots. One tells the other, "The robots all developed self-awareness, and then self-loathing. Now all they want to do is write novels." I suspect these robots are actual authors of this film's script.
In a tremendous insult to many actually talented filmmakers, Paste Magazine, in their March, 2010 issue, just listed Ms. Coppola as one of the "Top Fifty Living Directors," strictly on the basis of this one, pretentious film. They don't mention her even worse subsequent efforts, all of which are unwatchable unless one is sedated. Meanwhile, they left great directors like Nicholas Roeg and Monte Hellman, neither of whom has died, as far as I know, off the list entirely. No one will remember this fraud of a movie in another ten years, but the works of Roeg and Hellman will be preserved as classics of the cinema, and discussed by future film scholars the way the works of great directors of the past are discussed in film schools today. Ms Coppola has no more talent as a director than she demonstrated as an actor in that awful performance in her father's weakest "Godfather" sequel.
How so many otherwise astute critics were fooled by this piece of self-indulgent navel gazing, I can't understand. But nepotism runs deep in Hollywood, and perhaps there was some degree not wanting to disrespect Francis which colored their judgment.