MogwaiMovieReviews

Ridley Scott's generally well-made female buddy movie with an ugly and rather hysterical feminist agenda, presenting Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as women on the run who would rather die than live in a world with men in it. All the male characters are depicted as bad or defective in some way, through a lens showing them in the worst possible light, so even though it undeniably works as a piece of entertainment, it comes with a deeply unpleasant aftertaste if you ever stop to think about what you're watching at all.

Any woman who tells you this is her favourite movie is a woman who will kill you in your sleep if you annoy her, so probably best to avoid.

Decently-made but unpleasantly-solipsistic girl's film about a young woman working on the concessions stand at a cinema starting a relationship with an older, awkward guy, only to find him not as good a kisser as she'd hoped, so she destroys his life. The film is continually peppered with flashes of her internal romantic and/or violent fantasies, picturing the poor fellow either attacking her or talking to his shrink about what a perfect woman she is, and these are presented without judgement, so it's hard to tell whether the whole thing is earnestly supposed to be a feminist film or a warning as to what feminist propaganda does to the mental health of young women. Either way, it makes you want to avoid women completely for the rest of your life if you're a guy.

Feels a bit like a feature-length episode of "Girls", if that helps, though it's almost never funny.

Love the music, love the man and love the stories (which I've mostly heard before), but the presentation is far too stagey, over-produced and over-rehearsed: it comes across awkward, stilted and lifeless, and all the humour falls flat. The halfbaked and halfhearted renditions of the songs are uniformly awful, too. Would have been much better to just have shot it like a stand-up gig with two or three cameras at the side of the stage capturing the atmosphere on the night. You get the feeling he was hoping to make a "Stop Making Sense" or a "Swimming To Cambodia" but ended up with a 90-minute-long unfunny sketch for the Stephen Colbert show.