Husband and I are in the target demographic for this movie. He went home after 45 minutes. The basic premise of the movie is bad from the get-go: 4 intelligent lifelong friends meet every month for book club, read 50 Shades of Grey, are enthralled and titillated, and it changes their attitudes to love. Since no intelligent woman was ever enthralled by 50 Shades of Grey, which is badly written soft porn at best, you've got to suspend a lot of disbelief right there.
Then we've got Diane Keaton. She can't act. She REALLY can't act. I'm not sure she could ever really act, but she definitely hasn't put in a decent performance since Something's Gotta Give, when the plot allowed her to do the same schtick she always does, and get away with it. And then there's her clothes. When an actor's clothes become a distraction from the movie, you know that things are going downhill rapidly. Diane Keaton has been wearing the same pants, jacket, shirt and scarf wrapped around her neck for half a century now. In every movie and in her everyday life. If she's that self conscious about a saggy neck, she needs to go see a plastic surgeon and then send all those scarves to clothe a small developing nation somewhere. Possibly a large one. And why on earth would someone be wearing a felt hat when floating on an inflatable swan in a swimming pool at NIGHT? She even gets to wear that wretched beret of hers in one scene.
Jane Fonda is awful in this too. She can still act when she's got good material and a good director and not too big a part (e.g. The Newsroom), but when the material and the direction is pretty rubbish, so too is her exaggerated performance (Grace and Frankie).
Mary Steenbergen plays the same sweet ditzy character she's always played (Back to the Future III anyone?) Never been a very good actress and she's getting too long in the tooth now to pull it off. She puts in another mediocre performance here, again not helped by appalling dialogue.
I was looking forward to seeing Candice Bergen on the screen again, as she's been gone a long time. She puts in an ok performance, but the dialogue is woeful and she's not good enough to lift it.
I thought maybe this movie would be something a little bit like the Jane Austen Book Club, which had a tight script, good storylines about interesting female characters and was well acted. I was very, very wrong.
Then we've got Diane Keaton. She can't act. She REALLY can't act. I'm not sure she could ever really act, but she definitely hasn't put in a decent performance since Something's Gotta Give, when the plot allowed her to do the same schtick she always does, and get away with it. And then there's her clothes. When an actor's clothes become a distraction from the movie, you know that things are going downhill rapidly. Diane Keaton has been wearing the same pants, jacket, shirt and scarf wrapped around her neck for half a century now. In every movie and in her everyday life. If she's that self conscious about a saggy neck, she needs to go see a plastic surgeon and then send all those scarves to clothe a small developing nation somewhere. Possibly a large one. And why on earth would someone be wearing a felt hat when floating on an inflatable swan in a swimming pool at NIGHT? She even gets to wear that wretched beret of hers in one scene.
Jane Fonda is awful in this too. She can still act when she's got good material and a good director and not too big a part (e.g. The Newsroom), but when the material and the direction is pretty rubbish, so too is her exaggerated performance (Grace and Frankie).
Mary Steenbergen plays the same sweet ditzy character she's always played (Back to the Future III anyone?) Never been a very good actress and she's getting too long in the tooth now to pull it off. She puts in another mediocre performance here, again not helped by appalling dialogue.
I was looking forward to seeing Candice Bergen on the screen again, as she's been gone a long time. She puts in an ok performance, but the dialogue is woeful and she's not good enough to lift it.
I thought maybe this movie would be something a little bit like the Jane Austen Book Club, which had a tight script, good storylines about interesting female characters and was well acted. I was very, very wrong.