Margot at the Wedding
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Yea i agree, this movie was a huge waste of talent and time. A really unenjoyable film to sit through, i too found myself hoping it would end soon, and thats not a good sign because its a pretty short film. I did like kidman though, i thought she was good, and she is a good actress....i don't think she deserved her oscar or even a nomination for the hours. I thought she deserved a nomination for supporting in eyes wide shut, a nomination for lead in to die for and thats about it, i can't argue with a nomination for moulin rouge though even though i thought she was better in the others. And she was ok in dogville and birth but they were really bad films for me...dogville was at the level of margot at the wedding but literally twice as long. But in margot at the wedding, jennifer jason leigh was the real great performance, i would probably nominate her right now if it was up to me....she carried a subpar jack black and somehow made all her scenes work in the middle of this misfire of a film.
HA HA HA!Uri wrote:As for Birth, all I could think of while watching it was "God, this woman's head is so grotesquely small!"
I guess we just see her in different ways, Uri. I find her fascinating on screen and she was one of the best things about that horrible movie The Hours anyway. To me, Kidman is only out of her league when she's cast in frothy comedies or roles that require her to be warm.
Akash wrote:Oh Uri! Have you seen Dogville and Birth? Kidman can be a fantastic, compelling actress when given the right role.
I really have no time for this, but since it's you…
Kidman was perfectly suited for Von Treir's vision – her acting is the equivalent of the sets in that film – all she's capable off, acting wise, is to suggest some basic, flatly drawn outlines of a characterization, waiting for a real actor to come and turn it into a three dimensional one. It is painfully obvious when she's faced with a real actor – Clarckson here or Richardson in The Hours – and they viciously wipe her off the screen. She did have one stunning moment in Dogvile though. It's when the truck cover turns translucent and she is seen sleeping underneath – it's a glorious, Lillian Gish like image, but I guess it has more to do with the lighting than with her acting chopes. (Apropos Gish, it's very interesting to look at Dogvile with The Wind in one's mind, but that's another issue).
As for Birth, all I could think of while watching it was "God, this woman's head is so grotesquely small!"
Edited By Uri on 1199173065
As with anything she's involved with (at least cinema wise) this woman is completely lacking any ability to contribute anything to the situation she's in.flipp525 wrote:Kidman has fond memories of their time together. She says, "We all lived in this house in the Hamptons. Jennifer would cook breakfast on Sunday, and we'd all go to work Monday to Friday, and hang out on the weekend. Jack (Black) would play guitar. (And) we'd lie around in the bed, rehearsing. You don't make films like that right now - it's more a seventies way of making films."
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What a complete waste of talent. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman are good, but this film is a stinker. From the pretentious dialogue to the laughable (in a bad way) performance of Jack Black, I couldn't wait for it to get over (and it felt like it took its sweet time getting there).
Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is a very good little movie with some excellent performances, but Margot at the Wedding almost seems like a sequel. Parents as writers separating from one another and the kids that are caught between. Human masturbation must be a fetish fro Baumbach as we have more of it here...There are times when frankness is exploited for cheap wittiness.
Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is a very good little movie with some excellent performances, but Margot at the Wedding almost seems like a sequel. Parents as writers separating from one another and the kids that are caught between. Human masturbation must be a fetish fro Baumbach as we have more of it here...There are times when frankness is exploited for cheap wittiness.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
I don't know how the film will turn out but I did kind of like this little tidbit:
Kidman, Black and Leigh Turn Housemates To Perfect Roles
Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman, Jack Black and Jennifer Jason Leigh moved in together during filming for new movie Margot At The Wedding, because they wanted to perfect their roles as a dysfunctional family. The three actors lived in a house in the Hamptons area of New York while working on the Noah Baumbach-directed drama earlier this year, and Kidman has fond memories of their time together. She says, "We all lived in this house in the Hamptons. Jennifer would cook breakfast on Sunday, and we'd all go to work Monday to Friday, and hang out on the weekend. Jack (Black) would play guitar. (And) we'd lie around in the bed, rehearsing. You don't make films like that right now - it's more a seventies way of making films."
Kidman, Black and Leigh Turn Housemates To Perfect Roles
Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman, Jack Black and Jennifer Jason Leigh moved in together during filming for new movie Margot At The Wedding, because they wanted to perfect their roles as a dysfunctional family. The three actors lived in a house in the Hamptons area of New York while working on the Noah Baumbach-directed drama earlier this year, and Kidman has fond memories of their time together. She says, "We all lived in this house in the Hamptons. Jennifer would cook breakfast on Sunday, and we'd all go to work Monday to Friday, and hang out on the weekend. Jack (Black) would play guitar. (And) we'd lie around in the bed, rehearsing. You don't make films like that right now - it's more a seventies way of making films."
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Here's a review from Variety. If other critics reaction to the film are similar you can cross this one off.....
Margot at the Wedding
Posted: Sun., Sep. 2, 2007, 10:33pm PT
A Paramount Vantage release of a Scott Rudin production. Produced by Rudin. Co-producer, M. Blair Breard. Directed, written by Noah Baumbach.
Margot - Nicole Kidman
Pauline - Jennifer Jason Leigh
Malcolm - Jack Black
Jim - John Turturro
Dick - Ciaran Hinds
Claude - Zane Pais
Ingrid - Flora Cross
Maisy - Hallet Feiffer
By TODD MCCARTHY
Nicole Kidman plays the antagonistic sister of Jennifer Jason Leigh in Noah Baumbach's family drama 'Margot at the Wedding.'
"Margot at the Wedding" is a circus of family neuroses and bad behavior that perhaps a therapist could make sense of better than Noah Baumbach can. Displaying some of the keen insight into the screwed-up minds of East Coast literati the writer-director displayed so winningly in "The Squid and the Whale" and showing ever-developing instincts as a director, this study of a disastrous reunion of two sisters feels more like a collection of arresting scenes than a fully conceived and developed drama. Certain acclaim from some quarters will fuel good initial B.O. in major cities, but off-the-charts self-involvement of all the characters will stall crossover to wider auds.
This is a clan whose members think nothing of playing out all their psychosexual traumas and intimate personality conflicts in front of their assorted children of all ages; in fact, the adults don't even stop to realize they're doing it. Perhaps some viewers will accept this as brutally honest telling-it-like-it-is, but the spectacle of such heedless self-absorption by people whose job it is to be insightful, as writers and teachers and artists, will prove too great an irony for most viewers to swallow.
Setting the standard for self-absorption for all others to follow is the beauteous Margot (Nicole Kidman), a short-story writer of some note who journeys with her puberty-pushing son Claude (Zane Pais) to the family compound along the Eastern seaboard as surprise guests at the wedding of teacher sis Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to self-styled artist Malcolm (Jack Black).
Long estranged, the sisters may fantasize about burying the hatchet for the weekend, but the impossibility of this instantly becomes apparent when Margot, sustained by steady doses of white wine and weed, begins laying into Pauline and trying to talk her out of marrying Malcolm, an obese layabout with nothing apparent going for him. "He's like guys we rejected when we were 16," Margot cuttingly points out, although there is a mitigating factor: Pauline -- who already has a daughter, Ingrid (Flora Cross), a bit younger than Claude -- is pregnant.
Margot has her own hidden agenda. Fed up with her marriage, she has insisted her husband Jim (John Turturro) not come to the wedding. Assuredly not by coincidence, she has a local bookstore appearance scheduled with former flame Dick (Ciaran Hinds), an arrogant fellow writer she seems intent on hooking up with again. Dick's provocative teenage daughter, Maisy (Hallet Feiffer), is also around to do her part in stirring the male hormones and spurring subsequent recriminations.
All this reps an unholy stew of ill will, festering emotions, latent resentments, barely disguised agendas and rampant incivility, so it's a tribute to Baumbach's skills as a writer and director that he manages to make spending time with these folks as tolerable as he does. Any number of dialogue exchanges, especially between the sisters, are exceptionally sharp, as old scores are resurrected, new charges are filed and secrets are spilled in a bobsled ride of cascading accusations and emotions.
Stylistically, the film is most exciting in the way Baumbach and editor Carol Littleton boldly cut right into dramatic scenes that are already underway and sometimes jump out of them before they conclude in a normal manner. Many interludes bear a resemblance to the sort of bitter intra-family dialogue one is accustomed to hearing in serious theatrical dramas, but the traditional shaping of such scenes has been scrapped in favor of something that approaches the dramatic equivalent of cinematic jump-cutting.
The rhythm is reinforced by the discreet handheld camerawork by virtuoso lenser Harris Savides, who gets in close but without any jitters or getting into the actors' tonsils. Only the extremely dim, washed-out night and low-light scenes create any visual disappointment.
Thesps are constantly charged up, their nerve endings frayed and exposed. Kidman is the rawest as the most dangerously neurotic and manipulative of the bunch, Leigh the most prone to mood swings, while Black, whose character is not yet a family insider -- more luck to him -- works in a mode of emotional opaqueness that itself may mask the man's intense neuroses. Newcomer Pais is very good as the son who learns way too much too fast.
Strong humor flecks the film's opening passages, and it's a good bet that more of it would have made the latter stages more palatable, as was the case in "Squid." For all the talent on display, many viewers will have had more than enough of these characters well before the relatively brief running time has expired.
Camera (Deluxe color), Harris Savides; editor, Carol Littleton; production designer, Anne Ross; art director, Alan Stockhausen; set decorator, Debra Schutt; costume designer, Ann Roth; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Drew Kunin; sound designer, Paul Urmson; re-recording mixers, Lee Dichter, Urmson; assistant directors, Joe Camp III, Jono Oliver; casting, Douglas Aibel. Reviewed at Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 1, 2007. (Also in Toronto, New York film festivals.) Running time: 91 MIN.
Margot at the Wedding
Posted: Sun., Sep. 2, 2007, 10:33pm PT
A Paramount Vantage release of a Scott Rudin production. Produced by Rudin. Co-producer, M. Blair Breard. Directed, written by Noah Baumbach.
Margot - Nicole Kidman
Pauline - Jennifer Jason Leigh
Malcolm - Jack Black
Jim - John Turturro
Dick - Ciaran Hinds
Claude - Zane Pais
Ingrid - Flora Cross
Maisy - Hallet Feiffer
By TODD MCCARTHY
Nicole Kidman plays the antagonistic sister of Jennifer Jason Leigh in Noah Baumbach's family drama 'Margot at the Wedding.'
"Margot at the Wedding" is a circus of family neuroses and bad behavior that perhaps a therapist could make sense of better than Noah Baumbach can. Displaying some of the keen insight into the screwed-up minds of East Coast literati the writer-director displayed so winningly in "The Squid and the Whale" and showing ever-developing instincts as a director, this study of a disastrous reunion of two sisters feels more like a collection of arresting scenes than a fully conceived and developed drama. Certain acclaim from some quarters will fuel good initial B.O. in major cities, but off-the-charts self-involvement of all the characters will stall crossover to wider auds.
This is a clan whose members think nothing of playing out all their psychosexual traumas and intimate personality conflicts in front of their assorted children of all ages; in fact, the adults don't even stop to realize they're doing it. Perhaps some viewers will accept this as brutally honest telling-it-like-it-is, but the spectacle of such heedless self-absorption by people whose job it is to be insightful, as writers and teachers and artists, will prove too great an irony for most viewers to swallow.
Setting the standard for self-absorption for all others to follow is the beauteous Margot (Nicole Kidman), a short-story writer of some note who journeys with her puberty-pushing son Claude (Zane Pais) to the family compound along the Eastern seaboard as surprise guests at the wedding of teacher sis Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to self-styled artist Malcolm (Jack Black).
Long estranged, the sisters may fantasize about burying the hatchet for the weekend, but the impossibility of this instantly becomes apparent when Margot, sustained by steady doses of white wine and weed, begins laying into Pauline and trying to talk her out of marrying Malcolm, an obese layabout with nothing apparent going for him. "He's like guys we rejected when we were 16," Margot cuttingly points out, although there is a mitigating factor: Pauline -- who already has a daughter, Ingrid (Flora Cross), a bit younger than Claude -- is pregnant.
Margot has her own hidden agenda. Fed up with her marriage, she has insisted her husband Jim (John Turturro) not come to the wedding. Assuredly not by coincidence, she has a local bookstore appearance scheduled with former flame Dick (Ciaran Hinds), an arrogant fellow writer she seems intent on hooking up with again. Dick's provocative teenage daughter, Maisy (Hallet Feiffer), is also around to do her part in stirring the male hormones and spurring subsequent recriminations.
All this reps an unholy stew of ill will, festering emotions, latent resentments, barely disguised agendas and rampant incivility, so it's a tribute to Baumbach's skills as a writer and director that he manages to make spending time with these folks as tolerable as he does. Any number of dialogue exchanges, especially between the sisters, are exceptionally sharp, as old scores are resurrected, new charges are filed and secrets are spilled in a bobsled ride of cascading accusations and emotions.
Stylistically, the film is most exciting in the way Baumbach and editor Carol Littleton boldly cut right into dramatic scenes that are already underway and sometimes jump out of them before they conclude in a normal manner. Many interludes bear a resemblance to the sort of bitter intra-family dialogue one is accustomed to hearing in serious theatrical dramas, but the traditional shaping of such scenes has been scrapped in favor of something that approaches the dramatic equivalent of cinematic jump-cutting.
The rhythm is reinforced by the discreet handheld camerawork by virtuoso lenser Harris Savides, who gets in close but without any jitters or getting into the actors' tonsils. Only the extremely dim, washed-out night and low-light scenes create any visual disappointment.
Thesps are constantly charged up, their nerve endings frayed and exposed. Kidman is the rawest as the most dangerously neurotic and manipulative of the bunch, Leigh the most prone to mood swings, while Black, whose character is not yet a family insider -- more luck to him -- works in a mode of emotional opaqueness that itself may mask the man's intense neuroses. Newcomer Pais is very good as the son who learns way too much too fast.
Strong humor flecks the film's opening passages, and it's a good bet that more of it would have made the latter stages more palatable, as was the case in "Squid." For all the talent on display, many viewers will have had more than enough of these characters well before the relatively brief running time has expired.
Camera (Deluxe color), Harris Savides; editor, Carol Littleton; production designer, Anne Ross; art director, Alan Stockhausen; set decorator, Debra Schutt; costume designer, Ann Roth; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Drew Kunin; sound designer, Paul Urmson; re-recording mixers, Lee Dichter, Urmson; assistant directors, Joe Camp III, Jono Oliver; casting, Douglas Aibel. Reviewed at Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 1, 2007. (Also in Toronto, New York film festivals.) Running time: 91 MIN.
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