Highly recommended - if you have no taste or human decency

Rating: 1/10 (25 August 2006)

At first I was suckered in by this movie - cool British actors like Emma Thompson, swank shots of London, the British love/hate attitude towards America.
But slowly, steadily, it began to dawn on me - this movie is incredibly bad and misogynistic to boot. By the end of the movie I was writhing with disgust at the waste of good acting talent and two hours of my life.
I just saw it tonight on pay-per-view. Normally I won't pay for a movie unless I have a pretty good idea what it's about and a good sense that I'll like it. I threw caution to the wind and rented this one without all that. HUGE mistake.
It's the perfect movie for evolutionary psychologists. The successful pairings are older powerful men and younger women, or a young guy and 4 women, or young guy and porn star. If you're older, like Laura Linney, you get no sex with a hot hot man because your brother's a violent looney, and your entire life is dedicated to nurturing him, or you're older and married with kids, like Emma Thompson and your husband is screwing his secretary and you just suck it up. Didn't you know you're a piece of crap older woman whose sex life is over? Now go make yourself useful by making a costume for your kid.
I mean, I knew that evolutionary psychology was big in Britian, but had no idea things were that bad.
And incredibly some people claim that this is a movie for middle-aged women. Maybe middle-aged women who hate themselves.
And of course there's the awful awful plots. And the heaping piles of bad music and two stupid horrible scenes one after the other - the little boy on the plane, and the English guy in Portugal, with the stupid "inspirational" music pounding you over the head.
Yes, love is all around, unless you're the funny fat sister. Then you get nothing and everybody hates you - and the filmmakers invite everybody to laugh at you.
That's what really makes anybody with taste or sensitivity or humanity hate this movie. Because it keeps smugly patting itself on the back for its sensitivity and LOVE when in fact it's a woman-hating, schmaltz-churning, vomit-producing travesty.
I'm so glad there is a site like this where I can not only get a chance to get some of the feelings of loathing and sickness induced by this movie out of my system, but I can see that there are other sane, discerning people in this world who also get why this movie is so deeply, fundamentally, soul-destroyingly wrong.
And a shout-out to NYTimes critic A.O. Scott for totally nailing this movie and its many and varied evils.