Broken English (2007)

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's supposed to be a realistic-ish adult movie, filmed in real Manhattan locations like the Film Forum. It has a kind of flatly realistic tone. But it came out in 2007 and Nora and her friends all smoke ALL THE TIME like it's 1965 without bothering to go outside. She wears silk dresses all of the time, of varying lengths including really short, one after another. Then suddenly she's got longish denim cutoffs on. But of course with a loose ballet style top. She has emotional breakdowns all the time in public. She's having dinner with some guy and her married couple friends and she acts like a 13 year old who doesn't want to be there. She walks out of her job in an emotional huff, again like a 13 year old, not a 30 something. New York (and Sarah Lawrence graduates everywhere) 30 somethings have learned how to hide everything. She just seems more high maintenance needy than anything else.Her and her friend ask the Paris cabbie to find a nice but cheap hotel. He delivers them to a place where the room is plain but looks newly done and is roomy for a big city, has a HVAC system, and everything is color and pattern coordinated. They sneer. There's a hair dryer on the wall and they go to bed with towels on their heads. She wears all kinds of different outfits in Paris and doesn't really have any luggage, just two small to medium sized bags.SPOILER ALERT (although these points were mentioned in media reviews)All very not-normal for NYC and Paris in 2007. Then of course the obligatory not being able to figure out a way to get a phone number, for a person who is a professional high end fixer as Roger Ebert wrote about. Actually she doesn't even try. And then she acts oddly distant when she (one in a million chance) runs into the guy on the Metro.So it's not just like Roger said that there's suddenly a plot point necessitated unrealistic problem, but that the unrealisticisms run throughout a film trying to be realish.If it comes up on your local PBS station, what the heck, maybe watch it. I did. It was oddly completely washed out and I had to adjust everything to abnormal values to get it to look halfway decent, but who knows whose fault that was.

Dull, tedious story of a neurotic, marriage-fixated, anxiety-ridden alcoholic who somehow gets a great guy interested in her. I guess the moral of the story is "Life is so unfair"? Even worse than the shallow plot, trite dialog and phone-in acting is the grating "music" - I actually started turning down the volume whenever it was playing. It makes elevator music sound like Mozart! Not only was there little chemistry between the two leads, there was even less between the two so-called best friends. Don't casting agents check for that during try-outs? Only for die-hard fans of Posey, who does the best she can with the boring script. All others, stay away - there are so many better rom-coms: The American President, Love Actually, Lars and the Real Girl, You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle... almost anything is better than this one.

This is a very depressing movie. I am not sure why it has been billed as a comedy. The lead actress stumbles and grimaces through a misguided haze of cigarette smoke, alcohol and a couple of boyfriends before she arrives at a similar chain-smoking and alcoholic Frenchman. An interminably boring and totally inexplicable courtship follows before the inevitable chasing-across-the-countries-and-getting-united plot.It is the same old tired storyline bottled in a cracked old beer bottle. There is not a scene in a movie where the actor/actresses/extras aren't drinking or smoking. You would think that the same old tried and tested plot would elicit some happiness in the audience, but NO. The whole cast and the director manage to "skillfully" derail even the tired formula for happiness into a depressing, poorly acted, bitter and direction-less rut.Please don't waste your two hours watching this excuse for a "comedy". I think it should be a crime to make such ridiculously dull tripe. Portraying the two main agents of chronic disease (smoking and alcohol) in superfluous detail doesn't redeem this load of rubbish, any. Yuck.

One of my most anticipated films of the year turns out to be a bit of a typical rom-dram snoozer. Despite a stellar cast, Zoe Cassavettes' first film is a bit of a misfire. It seems she was going for an old-school type of romance film with a modern (yet unoriginal) twist, but I watched this thinking "If I wanted to watch an old-fashioned romantic drama, I'd rather just watch a movie from the 40s." Not to compare this to the breakthrough film of that-other-daughter-of-a-famous-director, but this totally has a "Lost in Translation" vibe going on. Except it isn't nearly as engrossing or well-made. The movie's best feature is, of course, Parker Posey. I do give credit to Cassavettes for taking a chance to show something that not many other directors have been willing to do--that Posey is a brilliant dramatic actress. Sure, she's a brilliant comedienne and this is what she's known for, but one look at "Broken English" or "Personal Velocity will" prove that this woman is every bit as good as your Streeps or your Hepburns. She just needs better roles! Justin Theroux is excellent, though only in the film for 15 minutes or so. I do fear he's getting typecast as the cocky yuppie or Hollywood type. So this one isn't a total waste of time, but I'd say it's for fans of the cast only.