Men, Women & Children (2014)

Let's be realistic.

Best movie ever!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's the modern world for a group of Texas high school teens and their parents. Celebrity obsessed Donna Clint (Judy Greer) is the mother of mean girl Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) who puts her on a website. Patricia Beltmeyer (Jennifer Garner) is the over-protective mother of Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever). Don Truby (Adam Sandler) and Helen Truby (Rosemarie DeWitt) are parents struggling with two boys and internet porn. Allison Doss is struggling with body issues and anorexia. Kent Mooney (Dean Norris)'s son Tim (Ansel Elgort) quits football.It's all very sad and tiring. The cold narration from Emma Thompson does not help. Jason Reitman dresses up this jumble of Lifetime scary stories into a tapestry of modern isolation and sadness. I'm not invested in any of these characters. The whole movie leaves me cold and uncaring.

Will definitely look for it, I just popped this in from my vast selection of stuff, didn't even look at the title, saw Adam Sandler and I really love Sandler in less than his average flix so I was like what the hell. Boy what an awesome surprise. Adam knocks it out but really there was such a really nice healthy size cast and a really healthy thick plot and a super healthy nice thick big... long Theme! Infinitely long, us, we are the center of the universe, or our universe and it doesn't even matter, well not really, if we are standing a billion light years away in a galaxy far very far away, but unfortunately we are here, we come with our junk in our trunk and as we get into in our lil' blue spec of life we begin to fill it, everyone and everything else lends a hand to our trunk and pretty soon we have to make a pit stop and have a garage sale if we are lucky, maybe someone will pick up our junk and it will be their gold, who knows it might be aliens a million years from now, hopefully someone picks up my junk before the infinite vast universe goes "Crunch" , I so, oh so loved this flix - I'm sure the book must be a billion times ahead of its time... One thing I have to say, I researched this novelist's wiki page and it seems he has been deemed the go to guy in effigy to burn at the stake. Well, I am here to say, I hope a big meteor lands on the next person or persons and burn them up first for they do nothing and will do nothing for this world unlike the artist they are trying to dump on. Get a life and learn that the world does not revolve solely on the things you like or deem appropriate! Long live Chad , I love you and hope you have a very successful career! :)

The film is a messy, chaotic mishmash of sub-plots that predictably fail to amalgamate into one overall, coherent plot. Though little is resolved at the end, the movie isn't a complete waste of time, if only for the pleasure of seeing Adam Sandler play a normal human being for a change. The film tries to be a cautionary tale both for and against the Internet and its misuse, abuse, and overuse, but it fails both ways, and ends up canceling itself out. It tries to remind us that despite the internet - or, perhaps because of it - we are still real, live human beings, with flesh and blood and wants and needs and desires and lusts and fears and angst, but we already knew that since about 2004, so it's about a decade too late.

Jason Reitman's take on the "online world". The entire movie revolves around teenagers and grownups communicating using the internet (especially using their mobiles, but not just). It's like "Magnolia" in the digital age. At times it feels like a script by a grandpa trying to be "hip" and current with today's online world. At other times it feels like a mirror of today's society and how people (dis)communicate through apps, texting, gaming and websites (social, dating, pornography). It seems there isn't a single social app or website the movie doesn't include.All in all, this movie is so-so. I think the it's intended more for teenagers.Good stuff: 1. Good acting by the entire cast, including usually-bad actors like Adam Sandler and Jennifer Garner. 2. The ending is good.