Afterglow

"You're the most fascinating woman I've ever met", he tells her after knowing her for about five minutes. Perhaps that will give you a sense of the sophomoric nature of "Afterglow"; a film which tells of two neurotic married couples, one middle aged (Nolte/Christie) and one younger (Boyle/Miller), and their respective interwoven infidelities. With a solid core cast and good technical and artistic capabilities and an interesting premise, "Afterglow" should have offered more than characters we're not given to care about even if we could suspend disbelief long enough to care. Nonetheless, there's enough going for this mediocre drama to make it a worthwhile small screen watch for sofa spuds with an appetite for the subject.

How did this movie get rated 6.9 out of 10? Was Nick Nolte stuffing the ballot box? I agree with all who said it was boring and pretentious, but disagree that Julie Christie did much to help it.

what is this movie all about? The need for love. The ending is not completly managable but it has just the right tone to give you the right mood. The storytelling is weak, though. Jullie and Nick DO look great together and give some strong appearances throughout the movie. Worth seeing? once, only once.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this film. On the one hand, I have only praise for Alan Rudolph for writing a great character for Julie Christie to play and giving her a role she could truly sink her teeth in and prove again what a sensational actress she is. And yet - the film that has been built around her is an almost total dud. I found the plot lame, and Lara Flynn Boyle and Jonny Lee Miller execrable. But when Nick Nolte and especially Julie Christie are on screen, all is forgiven. They're great together, but it's Christie's film all the way. She is such a rarity - an actress who combines genuine Movie Star Glamour, the real deal, with a thoroughly modern sensibility. I could go on gushing, but let me just say that she is sublime and this film gives us an all too rare opportunity to see her in full glory, albeit in a vehicle that's less than worthy of her.

Well, I'll begin with what I think is certainly the best thing about this movie, and that would be the acting. Particularly, I think Lara Flynn Boyle and Nick Nolte give the two best performances in the film and play the two most interesting characters. Julie Christie, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her role in this is good, but I thought her character was actually the least interesting in this. Jonny Lee Miller's performance left me kind of unimpressed at first. I actually thought it was kind of bad to be honest. But after thinking on it, I think his performance is fine. It's my least favorite out of the four, but I think his acting fits his character's buttoned-up demeanor. I also enjoyed the music in this film. I enjoy jazz, so I found it very pleasant. I even searched for the soundtrack online. But as for the movie itself, I feel like it wants to be straightforward and unconventional at the same time, and I lost track of which movie it was supposed to be. On the surface, it's about two couples who end up unknowingly switching partners via infidelity. And yet two of the four people I don't really care that much about. Lara Flynn Boyle's character is the most interesting to me out of everyone, and I felt the most for her. While I don't condone what she does about her situation, hers seems the easiest to understand. Nick Nolte's character is my second favorite character in the film, and that's largely also in part of him just being a great actor. I don't condone his actions, and yet his unfaithfulness even has some slight reasoning behind it. But in the case of the characters played by Christie and Miller, not only are they not that interesting separately, but I don't even know what they saw in each other when they began their little fling other than the most obvious thing they had in common, which were unfaithful partners. I understood what led to each couple sort of going about doing things the way they did, however one couple's problems were shown and the others seems to just get explained. And yet, something was still off to me about a character. It seems like a movie where you have to try to make the most of what's here when it's not all spelled out. I don't mind movies like that, but when half of the characters/material are uninteresting and then you have to try to fill in gaps too, I just don't care at the end of the day. It's not a terrible movie, and it has good scenes, but I was kind of underwhelmed by it.