Angie

It will bring you to tears and make you laugh. Angie lives in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and dreams of a better life than everyone she knows. When she finds that she is pregnant by her boyfriend Vinnie, she decides that she will have the baby, but not Vinnie as a husband. This turns the entire neighborhood upside down and starts her on a journey of self discovery. This kind of sentimental character piece needs a tight focus so all of the nuances of the characters shine through. The characters in this film have a lot of depth, and that makes all the difference. I give this one a rating of 7 out of 10.

Comedy-drama from talented if erratic director Martha Coolidge concerns a modern Italian-American working woman in Brooklyn, pregnant and unmarried, finding herself curious about the mother who abandoned her and her father years before. Begins brightly, with Geena Davis seemingly well-cast in the lead, but it quickly becomes mired in colorless sub-plots (including the woman's resentful best friend and her abusive husband, a schizophrenic mother, a needy stepmother, a malformed infant, and a married boyfriend!). By the midway point, Davis begins to struggle in her role, pushing her pivotal moments too hard and losing her innate likability. Worse, this scenario is far too neat and tidy--and when the actors aren't being overly 'cute', they're screaming senselessly at each other. *1/2 from ****

Sometimes I wonder why Geena Davis' 1990s movies (apart from Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own) received a lot of bad reviews. Angie isn't even as bad as some would think.

Seeing how this film was marketed when it first came out when it isn't even a romantic comedy in the first place, it was no wonder some felt there was too many dramatic things going on all at once. In truth, Angie is an adult with a lot of unresolved issues due to her childhood abandonment by her mother. This 'baggage' leads her into becoming an irresponsible, selfish adult who does not know how to make good decisions; one incident after another, Angie is really one unlikable protagonist despite having a great circle of supportive friends and family. She even has a nice guy for a fiance - someone who actually wants to marry her when she gets pregnant. What does she do instead ? Having an affair with a stranger whom she barely knows.

However, this is the whole point about the movie. At the end Angie learns that it wasn't only her who was having hard time accepting herself. All the people who are important to her, all of them are having the similar feelings - it's just different situation.

I don't know how you feel about this film, but to me, this film is about learning how to accept own's past and how to love unconditionally. Such theme is getting rarer and rarer...

Though Geena Davis is a great actress, good at playing particularly strong-willed women, the screenplay for "Angie" just meanders all over the place, from light comedy to the staunchest of melodramas.

I mean, what kind of a movie has a woman go into labor while gyrating in a Santa Claus suit then show her give birth to a one-armed baby, get abandoned by her married lover, watch as her stepmother breast-feeds the one-armed baby, abandons said baby, finds her long-lost mother (who it turns out is a schizophrenic), learns that one-armed baby is in a coma... all in about 15 minutes.

This was one of the most uneven films I've ever seen. Turturro's particularly good in it as the best friend, yet her character is left out of the final half hour, though she's a central character, and never returned to. Rea and Gandolfini's potentials are completely wasted in a movie that just doesn't seem to know what to do with itself.

The video box cover promised hopeful viewers that the film contained inside was "a heartwarming story brimming with irrepressible fun. This was not so. We laughed at the movie, but certainly not with it. Telling the story of a hysterical, irresponsible and certainly resistable woman, this movie may be praised by critics but whatever quality they saw in it must have wound up on the cutting room floor. The characters are unlikable and obnoxious, the plot meanders without ever deciding where it wants to go, and sheer lethargy kept us from doing what we should have done five minutes into the film and shown our VCR some mercy. Do yourself a favour and avoid this mess, whatever the video box may say.